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Laptop with a car battery? 12V DC to 160 or whatever AC?
by throw1234651234 6y ago
Laptop with a car battery? 12V DC to 160 or whatever AC?
- thedanbob 6y agoProbably a DC-DC adapter, bypassing the power brick entirely.
- throw1234651234 6y agoThat would make sense, really interested in the details. Unrelated to anything, but makes me wonder how horribly inefficient running a car I4 is for providing power.
- kube-system 6y agoInternal combustion engines emit the majority of their energy as heat. A typical gasoline engine is 20% efficient at turning gasoline into rotational power. (and that's under ideal usage, usually they're designed to be most efficient at operating speed, not at idle) Anything you have connected to the crankshaft after that is additional inefficiency on top of that.
- drewzero1 6y agoLaptops (and computers in general) run on 12V DC and 5V DC (and more recently also 3.3V DC) internally. Modern laptop chargers tend to put out around 20V DC to charge the battery and stepped down by power management circuits. Not sure if it was already 20V in '98 or if laptops were still using 12V DC to charge the NiCads, I seem to remember car chargers that plugged the laptop directly into the cigarette lighter.