Originally Posted by
njkayaker
You know generators produce more power at higher speeds. It doesn't make sense thowing available power away by capping.
I guess I don't really feel like digging into it, but my understanding of converters is that they specifically output a constant amount of power, or not power at all. There's no variation, I believe.
Whether the dynamo produces differing amounts of power at different speeds is a different topic altogether.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
They maintain constant voltage actually. And turning stuff on and off repeatedly tends to increase the rate of failure. Put that risk in something that is cheap and easy to replace (a cache battery).
I'm not sure that's a problem on all converters, but I know for sure it's not the Luxos U as it has it's own cache battery.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
USB charging has fairly narrow voltage requirements (but looser amperage requirements).
Look at Unterhausen's story about how annoying it was to have his Garmin being directly attached. That would have been completely eliminiated if he was using a cache battery.
Would you have a link to that story? Curious to see it. (Edit: Never mind, it sounds more and more like you want to get into an endless debate in the topic which I do not have a strong interest in).
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
??? You charge the cache battery with the generator. You might be able to do away with the generator entirely with a just a much-cheaper cache battery.
You charge the battery with the generator, which you then get rid of the generator. You lost me.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
You are exaggerating the difficulty here. If you are riding long distances at night, you may need to use a cache battery anyway. During the day, it's possible that you can generate more power than your phone uses (a cache battery lets you capture that power).
And it seems like you're just trying to be argumentative here about "difficulty". I don't really care to get into a debate on this topic, I'm sure anyone reading can figure out that if the only thing you're charging is a phone how that will work.
Usually the idea is to charge during the day, then you have the dynamo for lighting at night.