I’ve been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
Except that they’ve ruined that too. You now need an account to view anything, so the reach of announcements is greatly diminished.
At this point leaving shouldn’t really be too difficult, since a large portion of your audience already has; because they’ve been shut out, or have quit voluntarily.
As of USB-PD 3.1 there are now nine fixed voltages - 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 36, and 48V - and two variable-voltage modes; PPS with 3.3 - 21V in 0.02V increments, and AVS with 15 - 48V in 0.1V increments.
Combined with a few different current limits, some of these features being optional, and then doubling down with what your cable does or doesn’t support, amazing anything gets charged at all.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t have a replacement for the “Android System WebView” component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
There’s a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla’s “GeckoView” component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won’t allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it’s so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
Unfortunately what’s shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.