Internal resistance rises ridiculously fast with depth of discharge but even in the range of "ohms" you can still squeeze out a good fraction of an amp, a decent fraction of a watt. Its surprising how much you can do with a tenth of a watt or whatever, this will work quite well with a remote control or wireless game controller or a kitchen timer, maybe not so well with RC cars or laptop power supplies or the stereotypical "charge your cellphone with a AA battery" product or 1000 lumen flashlights.
In the long run nobody's ever going to use cells in series so as to avoid depolarization / cell reversal type stuff. Its feasible now for low current stuff, what I'm getting at is "someday" people will be running portable drills off single cells. Its a long term trend in power conditioning.
Here's an on topic application report from (one of many) manufacturer of single cell upconverter chips.
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva194/slva194.pdf
Internal resistance rises ridiculously fast with depth of discharge but even in the range of "ohms" you can still squeeze out a good fraction of an amp, a decent fraction of a watt. Its surprising how much you can do with a tenth of a watt or whatever, this will work quite well with a remote control or wireless game controller or a kitchen timer, maybe not so well with RC cars or laptop power supplies or the stereotypical "charge your cellphone with a AA battery" product or 1000 lumen flashlights.
In the long run nobody's ever going to use cells in series so as to avoid depolarization / cell reversal type stuff. Its feasible now for low current stuff, what I'm getting at is "someday" people will be running portable drills off single cells. Its a long term trend in power conditioning.