| General > General Technical Chat |
| When did supercapacitors start being used in consumer products? |
| (1/5) > >> |
| Alex Eisenhut:
I recently bought a 1984 VCR, for fun, and of course I took it apart. It's the type with the channels on the tuner dialed in with cute little trimmers on top. So no digital memory required. Inside, I was surprised to immediately see what appears to be a supercap. I figure it's to recall the recording program setting. I didn't expect a supercap used in consumer stuff from '84. (If so... why can't 21st century stoves, microwaves, and fridges, etc recall their dumb settings when a single cycle of AC goes missing?) |
| Kim Christensen:
What's the capacitance value of that one? |
| Shonky:
Don't need a supercap to store settings. Flash or EEPROM can easily cover basic things that a typical appliance might use with some wear levelling if necessary. It's just they can't be bothered and realistically for many it's a not issue these days as power grids are pretty reliable. Where you *do* need a backup power source is to run an RTC. |
| ejeffrey:
A lithium coin cell could power an rtc for over a decade. But yeah, manifacturers can't be bothered. |
| helius:
I have seen supercaps inside several 1980s stereo receivers. I think as soon as CMOS SRAM and microcontrollers were available, supercapacitors were designed to complement them. The electric-double-layer technology would already have existed as a research material in the lab and this would be its first major application. A supercap of the size shown is around 1 farad at 2.5 V. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |