Havent done much in the way of projects lately. In fact, I’ve been dismantling lots of old house projects, including my electrified riding mower and my Raspberry Pi sprinkler controller. We are selling our house, so we are getting rid of lots of stuff, and doing lots of generic cleaning and repair. Nothing too interesting.

A long story with battery powered tools. Bought a 20V Black and Decker battery powered drill many years back. Little did I realize I was locking into future Black and Decker gear. Not a huge problem, but I probably would have bought something different if I had realized this. But I ended up buying a Black and Decker hedge trimmer and a leaf blower. The leaf blower was a mixed bag. Nicer than using a cord, but not much oomph or time on the batteries. Some bigger batteries fixed that problem and I bought a nicer charger.

I was looking to buy a small battery powered push mower, and instead of going with Black and Decker, I got a worx. Had read the 20V batteries were compatible, and the mower came with two big batteries. Well, they were just a little off. Couldn’t make them work with the Black and Decker equipment. Not a tragedy, but would have been nice if everything worked together.

I looked into adapters (there are some available to share batteries on some popular tool platforms). All I could find for Worx was an adapter for home projects. Just the plastic holder and two wires. Bought one and decided to cannibalize an old smaller battery pack and make my own adapter. Not as easy as I expected. Everything inside the battery pack was tightly fitted and even with the batteries removed, I still had to cut away lots of plastic to get the wires to where they had to go. Anyway, in the end it worked. Now I have batteries and chargers that will keep my leaf blower going for as much as an hour.