Yes - I’m always surprised by the way all the tool makers also make site stereo radios, with the newest ones featuring bluetooth so a worker can stream tunes from their phone. They also often have USB charging ports built in to recharge your phones. I personally hate music blaring on a construction site when I have to walk them, but its so deeply ingrained that the tool makers can sell at it.
The coffee maker is a more civilized version of this same kind of expansion by the tool makers. Note that this unit takes batteries from Makita’s 18v line and their 12v(10.8v) line.
Also, here’s Makita’s previous coffee maker - can work from a battery OR from wall current, and uses a permanent metal filter - no pods. Also, 1/3 the price - no wonder there’s a new version!
It’s actually progress, though it may not feel like it to you.
If you have an old lead-acid car battery, you can tell how much it is charged from the voltage. As the battery runs down, the voltage drops and the amount of power you can draw drops off too.
A NiCad battery has an amazingly square current-voltage characteristic. I used to use a battery razor, and was amazed at how it could be ploughing through the face-fuzz one second, and have not enough power to turn the blades at all the next. That is just what you need in a power tool. However, you can’t tell how much they are charged from the voltage at all. I used to do superconducting experiments that required up to 200 amps but with with no mains because we were looking for picovolts. I used a bank of NiCad batteries, but you had to take care not to overcharge them. The NiCad batteries in power tools sometimes have some chip which logs how much charge has been put in, because that is almost the only way of telling.
Finally, we come to Li-ion cells, which are much like the NiCad cells but lighter. You can’t wholly discharge them without ruining them. Some NiCad cells have this too - it comes from trying to make the battery light as possible. It’s a bit like rockets - get as much energy for as little weight, and hope it doesn’t go bang.
Okay. Now, suppose you make power tools. You want a modern, light cell, with a charger, and a controller so the tool can get the best torque and use as much of the charge as it can without risking the battery. I am sure Makita or Bosch would have used some standard battery pack and controls if they could get them off the shelf, but there weren’t any, so they each made their own, with a custom fitting so you couldn’t stick the wrong battery in. Perhaps when batteries stop evolving, we will have some USB-like standard where the battery tells you how much charge it has and how much current you can draw, and anything can plug into anything.
The power tool battery design and its evolution seems logical to me. Not all engineers are irredeemably evil.
Its definitely progress. Branded batteries in cordless tools is not a slide-back. Its been like this for a while, and perhaps someday it will be made generic. There are some adapters on the market to run tools with batteries across brands, but it adds bulk and does not overcome the incentive to stay with one brand.
But generally the LiION cells have made many cordless tools, particularly the drills and impact drivers, a totally sensible replacement for corded tools. Tools that draw higher power still offer trade-offs. But LiION has changed cordless tools for ever.
Lead-Acid made Britain great. Lead-Acid was and is good enough for a Rolls-Royce. Foreign batteries. Immigrant batteries. European control from Bosch, trying to tie down the British Lion with red tape. But no! We shall stand tall! With lead-acid power tools, we shall overcome!
Oh god, I had better stop before this becomes real…
I’m thinking more about things like cell phones and laptops, especially ones from a certain fruit-flavored manufacturer. Also, Microsoft has pulled that cunning stunt with the recent Surface tablets.
Sorry, I’m not spending big bucks for a disposable device.
Actually yes. It’s not about the coffee it’s about the proprietary battery packs. Once you get locked into one manufacturer’s power tools you end up buying drills, saws, lights, etc from the same company because the expensive batteries are all interchangeable. That’s the game here.
OK, sure, fair point, but Makita has been marketing tools with interchangeable Makita battery packs for about 30 years that I can remember personally, and I assume longer still. So this isn’t some newly developing issue with them.
Oh please spare me the interchangeable battery spiel. Can anyone give me a reason more than maybe 3 sizes of lead acid car batteries exist? And literally to the exact point that there are lead acid batteries that have the same CCA and same physical dimensions just the terminal polarity is switched. I mean, if “we” can’t get that under control there isn’t any hope for a private company’s design.
And a lot of manufacturer’s systems would run both Ni-Cad and Li-Ion. Besides atleast most of the major brands are building their packs around 18650 cells, which should make repair and upgrades easier.
As a side note, Facebook often shows me a Makita roomba looking thing. I assume it is to clean shop floors, but I bought into Milwaukee so I never bothered to look. Also if a company could make a good power scrubber for the bathtub that’d be bananas.
Well Ryobi has kept the same battery format since its move to LiION, and so you can use your old batteries in new tools, or use modern LiION batteries in your old tools. Only one that I know if that did that.
Also some of the latest high capacity batteries are moving on to cells that are bigger than the 18650s, so the internals are growing less alike over time as well.
yeah, but once you got two types of batteries, three don’t matter much, and you don’t notice anything more after that - so buy the tools you want and don’t be trapped.
And it is a marketplace that has had a lot of time for a competitor, one using more generic batteries to come along, and edge in on any of the several other brands that also use proprietary batteries.
