Does anyone have resources where I could learn about in-circuit battery recharging?

Start w/the wikipedia. Because there are several major types of batteries - you need to start here and figure out which you will be using in your design (i.e. NICD, NIMH, LION...).

Then, I would take on the Texas Instruments web site. TI has purchased a number of companies and have a good selection of battery management chips and application notes to go along with them. You will need to program these chips according to the battery specifications set fourth by the battery manufactures.

There are dozen of bytes of configuration in some chips. You may need a special USB to serial interface. Most of these chip will talk I2C, SMBus or HDQ.

Some of the programming is based on common knowledge, some peculiar to the battery type and some just magic (i.e. 'cause the battery manufacture said so). To get you started, there are usually 3 major types of chip out there.1) Fuel gage - a chip that tracks how much power is left in a battery - not nearly as easy as it sounds.2) Protection chips - chips that shut down a battery should something not look right.

3) Charger chips - chips that manage the feeding of a battery. Nothing keeps a manufacture from stuffing all this into a single chip. But most designs have them split out.

Keep in mind some batteries come with the battery management circuit built in. LION battery packs like ones you find in laptops and iPods batteries come with one or more of these circuits as part of the battery package. I think this is more likely when using LION batteries as they need to be protected from a full discharge (fully discharging LION batteries will destroy them!

). Wow, that's a lot to digest. Reflecting upon that I am wondering if you might be better off buying a working battery / charger and "hacking" it into your design?

I'm not sure what your project is, but I think I would start off looking at LION technology and finding out how people who hobby electric RC cars and electric RC air planes deal with the care and feeding of this type of battery chemistry. --- Last alternative - there are companies out there which specialize in making small sub assemblies that do exactly what you are after which you would OEM and solder onto your circuit board. For instance, no one designs DC/DC switching power supplies anymore - they buy these 1 inch by 1 inch sub assemblies and solder them onto their board.

I can't find one right now - but I think I saw one advertising in URL1 magazine.

I I think this may be the circuit you are looking for. When connected, it will charge the battery when it reaches the its lower limit, and stop when reaching the upper limit.

Try batteryuniversity.com Has quite a lot of information about batteries. You won't find any circuits there though if that's what you're looking for. But the info there should help you make one if you don't plan to simply obtain a dedicated battery charging chip.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.