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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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I appreciate the thought but for a flashlight it seems like over-designing that will just result in an unnecessarily high price. If you put in all batteries at the same time they will all run out at the same time too, so this won't be useful in practice.
So you don't appreciate the thought
Gotta admit I enjoyed this comment way too much.
Kudos good sir/madam and I hope you have an amazing day
I appreciate that they care about being innovative, trying to solve problems that haven't been solved before or just solving them in a better way. I appreciate that they don't just lazily take the conservative approach and rehash what's been done a thousand times before. In the end that's necessary to move society forward. Their efforts just didn't turn out well in this particular instance. I hope they do next time.
If your batteries voltage doesn't match the voltage of your LED you need a voltage regulator anyway. All you need is to design it in such a way that it will always provide something close to the right voltage (at the expense of run time when fewer batteries are available).
IIRC the Logitech wireless mice work that way too. They can take one or two batteries. Use two for long life or only one if you prefer a lighter mouse.
Obviously this flashlight was not designed for you. There are plenty of situations in which a flashlight is a critical piece of equipment.
I think the killer feature of that design is the ability to use two different sizes of battery and function no matter what is used. I'm not sure if I would personally ever put myself in a situation where I ran out of AA's and only had AAA's now that I bought myself a good supply of rechargeable ones, but I think that is a genuinely useful feature.
It is very useful in practice when you have a dead flashlight during a storm and only a few batteries in the kitchen drawer.
But it would likely be cheaper to buy an extra set of backup batteries than to buy that flashlight.
Its usefulness is based on the unexpected, not the expected.