Batteries have always been a dark mystery to users of things like portable computers and personal compact disk players – they stick the things in the recharger when device stops working, leave them there for an indeterminate time, stick them back in again and hope for the best. They soon find that one brand of recharger seems to do the job much better than another, that one brand of battery rated 670 milliAmp hours seems to last longer than another brand with the same rating – and that’s it. But at last, after 20 years in which things seemed to progress little, enormous effort is now going into improving battery technology and battery management is beginning to be addressed. SystemSoft Corp of Natick, Massachusetts has signed up with Duracell Inc to develop smart battery system software products that will enable more effective monitoring and control of system power consumption. SystemSoft has been developing a smart battery software suite that will incorporate the functionality of the Duracell-Intel Corp Smart Battery Data and the System Management Bus specifications, and the two will show off the results at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas, with ships planned in first quarter 1995. The software suite will display battery data such as the chemistry, capacity, battery status, and remaining percentage of battery life, and will provide a layer of control software so the user can set power management parameters and various alarms for notification of declining battery power, using a hot icon graphical display.
