An alkaline battery charger

Introduction

It's possible to re-charge alkaline batteries, regardless of what Duracell and Energizer write on the side of their batteries. You need to be slightly sophisticated about it, however, and not just willy-nilly pump a lot of current into the battery. A simple web search will show you simple methods to charge these batteries, but I'm coming up with a safe, automatic method.

The advantages of charging alkaline batteries are:

• Alkalines have a very long shelf life compared to classical rechargeable batteries (NiCd and Manganese dioxide)
• Alkaline batteries are very good for high load applications (high current draw)
• Alkaline batteries can be obtained practically free, since everyone just currently throws them out after use.
• Alkaline batteries have a high energy capacity.

I'll try to get pictures of my messy breadboard setup and post them here for you all to see. If you'd like to see the Arduino source code it's under public version control on github