Several years ago, I took a laptop battery into a Batteries Plus outfit because I couldn’t get a new one from the manufacturer any more. While waiting around, I was talking to the guy who mentioned that Lithium Polymer batteries are “…like little bombs” and that if they weren’t treated right, they’d explode.

And everyone learned about this with the exploding laptop batteries, that’s why I treat lithium polymer batteries like those running our precious Nikon D*’s with a lot of respect- don’t drop them, put them in a fire, stuff them up your nose, or take them apart.Much to my fascination, Bertho Boman hadn’t heard that they were little bombs and dissected one!Bertho writes that he does this for a living and has also designed chargers for large companies. He says he may write an article about the battery and the charger- hopefully he does, I think we’ve love to know what goes into the huge Nikon chargers.He was kind enough to let me thumbnail the most interesting show:Here are the pictures.

You can see in the lower left hand corner of the last picture where the water got to the battery.

That chip, the Atmel ATMEGA8L-8AJ is an 8-bit microcontroller that does 16MIPS at 16mhz (just for a battery!) and has 8k+ flash memory and some static ram.

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