Voltage & Current..

On the other hand, I do keep tring to teach some of my outdoor plants geometery... Seriously the TOTAL lack of regulation on "WallWarts" is quite common. I am currently (preofessionally) developing a product which normally operates off of AC power (via a wallwart), but needs to remort low AC conditions and fall back to battery. The load on this device is VERY dynamic ranging from under 10mA to over 850mA depending on what it is doing. The voltage fluctuations out of the wall wart (which is rated as 11.8V @ 1A) will rise as high as 17V when under a minimal load. Since the device is intended to have a very low production cost, they really cut some regulation requirements on the board as well, since the components WILL tolerate this range of voltages. Unfortunately, the side effect is that the voltage variation based on load is significantly greater than the voltage variation based on fluctuations in the AC (eg during a brown out). This has required the development of software that is constantly monitoriing the "active" state of many of the devices to "calculate" the current load, and then going through a transform to estimate the RAW AC that is providing power to the wart. DAvid.