this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Fwiw Molicel INR 21700's are rated for discharge down to -40C (pdf) though charging only down to 0C. I don't see a need for a sodium ion flashlight just yet, but I'm posting anyway since I guess it's news despite being stupid.

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[โ€“] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

It wouldn't surprise me if there's not yet any sodium charging chip for small consumer electronics like this. I haven't heard of a sodium powered flashlght, phone, or anything like that before. The only sodium consumer device I know of right now is a Bluetti power station which has 900WH: https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pioneer-na

It got some attention at its anouncement but tbh it's 10lb heavier and $300 more expensive than the 1024WH lithium version (Elite 100v2). So it's for early adopters only.

If you want to charge a small sodium cell, you can probably program an MCU to deliver the right charge profile, along with a few small external parts. That's how Apple phones worked at least in the past. They saved a fraction of a penny by just incorporating some extra logic and code in their big ASIC instead of having a separate charging chip. It's kind of interesting that the charger was programmed in Forth, on a special Forth processor (b16-small) that they cooked into a hardware macro: https://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html . They hired Bernd (the b16 designer) to write the code and it was pretty intricate because of the cpu's limitations. I don't think I'd have used that approach ;).

[โ€“] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 points 4 days ago

I know of one chip that is a sodium ion charger but I think it is only available in China and not in the west since the tech is picking up more speed there.

I guess you technically can use a Lithium ion charging chip with a programmable charge voltage like the BQ25300 but the problem is that almost every chip with a programmable charging voltage also has an under voltage shutoff to prevent deep Li-Ion discharge (usually 3, 2.5, or 2V), but that also means that you can only use like 50-80% of the already limited capacity.

One of my next projects is using GreenPak programmable signal matrix (like a very mini FPGA) to make a sodium charging chip I can put in projects.