Canon Patents a Battery Indicator That Shows Life of Connected Packs

Canon has filed a patent for a system that expands the battery indicator of a camera to also display the remaining life of a connected USB-C battery supply.

According to the patent document, this update will show both the internal (normal) battery charge state along with the battery percentage of the external connected power supply as well.

The patent documents, noticed by Canon News, was filed in Japan in January and published on August 5.

According to the present invention cell device, a battery device, the full charge capacity of the battery of an electronic device the remaining amount of the battery connected to the battery device of the battery device It has a display means for displaying information indicating the result of a calculation based on.

According to the present invention, it is possible to notify the full charge capacity of the battery of the electronic device, easy-to-understand user the relationship between the remaining amount of the battery, and of the battery connected device to the electronic device.

While Canon’s language here is a bit convoluted and doesn’t act as the best description of what to expect, in short it will allow the camera to recognize how much power is available both on its internal battery as well as what remains in connected power banks. That kind of information could be very useful for timelapse and astrophotographers who have to leave their systems running for hours at a time. It would also be especially useful for filmmakers who want to be able to have better visibility into how long they will be able to keep their cameras running.

Based on the diagrams and full documentation, it appears Canon intends on making it possible to read up to as many as four different batteries. It is not clear if this means four separate batteries, or if the external USB batteries will be separated based on the equivalent charge of the internal battery and “separated” out for a better understanding of just how much more life the camera has in it.

The documentation implies that as the main battery changes to drawing power from the USB battery pack(s), the new power indicators will provide an accurate description of how much combined battery power is left in the system.