I have to agree with
@jpnilson on this one. From first-hand experience, I know for a fact that "intelligent" battery power management dates back to the early-to-mid 90s.
I used to work for a local security firm near where I lived here in the UK, best part of 30 years ago. We covered a broad swathe of East Anglia, from Cambridge and Haverhill in the south to Bury St. Edmunds, Thetford and Diss to the north.
One of the firms we covered was an outfit called Vinten Broadcast, based in Bury St. Edmunds. These folks made the motorised tripods used by the big television studio cameras, and they didn't just buy in parts and assemble them like so many do.....oh, no. These guys were industry leaders, making absolutely everything on site, from casting their own chassis components in the on-site foundry, to having a fully-kitted out machine shop where all components were machined to their own exacting specs. They even built their own hydraulic and electronic components, and were for years a fixture on the FTSE 100 share index.
Anyhoo.....
They had for long enough supplied a range of out-door portable cameras, used for filming on location. During the mid-90s, just before I started doing nightly patrols there, they took an active part in developing the chemistry for the then nascent lithium battery technology that was so soon to burst onto the market.
I became quite friendly with one of the guys on the early shift, who was always getting ready for work as I was doing my final site patrol. We often had a natter about all sorts of things, and he was quite a "techie" type for that point in time. He it was who told me Vinten's electronics division had just recently made a breakthrough in the new battery technology.....one which we all take for granted today. They had developed the ability for the battery and the charger to "talk" to one another, so the battery was constantly informing the charger of its "needs" from one second to the next.....
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So, JP's quite right. With modern battery technology, so long as all components are functional & working as they should, it's physically impossible for modern batteries to overcharge or mess-up in any way. When they're charged, they're charged; bang! that's IT.......everything just shuts off.
Any issues you do hear about almost invariably involve either worn or faulty components, OR a design flaw of some kind. And design flaws are, I'm sorry to say, becoming more & more common.....especially with everyone having to watch the pennies, and cheap'n'nasty outfits springing up left, right & centre to meet the demand (and often "cutting corners" in the process).
Mike.
