Glubux's Powerwall (2016)

>the solution came with rearranging and adjusting the cells to ensure the packs worked more efficiently.

>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.

This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.

There HAS to be a way to automate this process and make it work at scale.

You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat. Even EV battery packs use them. Though it does raise the question - wouldn't an old EV battery be a better solution than stripping apart laptops?

>You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat

$50 of 18650s in a $500 trenchcoat with DRM protection. So wasteful.

When battery packs that have a non-zero chance of literally killing your users are commonplace, it actually does make sense to vendor-lock the battery. Believe it or not there is actual engineering that goes into making batteries beyond spot welding them to an interconnect and stuffing them into $.50 of ABS enclosure.

The "actual engineering" you are referring to is a $1.00 BMS board.

We are well past the point where we should have standardized batteries. We have bunch of standardized wall outlets that accommodate an array of "non-zero chance of literally killing your users" end products. No reason for battery packs to not be standardized (other than vendor lock in).

I'm sorry but you're dead wrong about the BMS. BMS doesn't address any of the things I listed.

You're also wrong about standardization - standarization at the cell form factor level is correct. Different applications have different capacity vs power density requirements, temperature range requirements, cost, lifecycle... a pouch cell that goes in a drone looks a lot like one that goes in a cell phone but they're optimized for completely different workloads.

Also we already have standardized interfaces for external batteries with most power banks using USB-C, so in a way your wish has already come true.