Anyone have any dead laptop batteries?

Hey everyone,

At the last get together I overheard someone saying there's not enough light in the back area of the Beecher dog. So I'm making an LED light array for some extra light. They will be solar charged so they're green and I'm using the good cells from dead laptop batteries to store the energy but I need more to complete the power aspect of the project.

If anyone has any electronics experience, I have 6 batteries that will be series/paralleled to make 12.69v 5Ah. Each battery is li-ion 18650 at 4.23v 2500mAh. The current draw from the array will be 4050mAh so I don't know if the batt config I have will be enough for the hours of use this may potentially get. I wonder if it could handle a higher current to get better batt life. Any suggestions/questions/comments?

I'm still fabricating the array and hopefully it'll be done by the end of the summer. It's going to be 486 3mm LEDs that glow at 14000 mcd which is roughly 2 lumens each. Production is pretty slow because of some complications but I can project to have a working prototype by the end of the summer.

But anyway, if you have a dead laptop batt that you want to donate to this cause please let me know. You can email me at timothy_fung187@yahoo.com.

-Tim

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Permalink Reply by Joseph Porcelli (Chief Neighbor) on May 15, 2010 at 5:42pm

Are there any other types of batteries that would work?

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Permalink Reply by Timothy Fung on May 16, 2010 at 8:10am

I guess it would depend on the batteries. It wouldn't really matter if it was a one time use, but if the voltage and current doesn't match they would probably explode if charged. What kind of batteries were you thinking of?

The reason I want laptop batteries is most of their batteries are the same type. Except Mac batts. Plus I'd be recycling useless batteries that most people would throw out (well useless to the general public lol).