Cadex celebrates its 40th Birthday in 2025. The first Cadex battery analyzer was sold in 1981 under Buchmann Enterprises Inc. After obtaining the Cadex trademark (®), I changed the company name to Cadex Electronics Inc. in 1985. ‘Cadex’ is derived from “Cadmium-Exerciser.” The early success of Cadex rests on my discovery to restore NiCd batteries with a secondary discharge. To automate service, I added the Auto program that refurbishes NiCds if the capacity of the Target Selector could not be met. The SnapLock™ adapters with the open C7 platform opened a new standard in battery analyzers that’s unique to Cadex. With rapid growth, we built our new Headquarters in 1998, but with the switch to Li-ion batteries, the demand for battery analyzers peaked and we maintained growth by building valued-added OEM for defense and healthcare.

Ready to build our new Headquarters

Renewal came with Management 2020 by developing devices supporting Diagnostic Battery Management (DBM). These chargers and analyzers work in standalone and connect to Cloud Analytics to make battery performance visible to users and supervisors. The Target Selector serving as gatekeeper also shows leftover charge at the end of day to validate battery performance.

Our innovations support OEMs to improve battery diagnostics in industry. Battery performance must be known at all times, equal to other power sources. The slogan: “Batteries are for flashlights; aren’t they?” no longer applies. RCM (Reliability-centered Maintenance) also moves to batteries, a technology was developed for the Boeing 747 in the 1960s with adaptation in nuclear, defense and railway industries.

Chargers are advancing to battery management systems to enable the full use each battery with call for replacement before failure. These systems running in the background improve reliability, lower total cost of ownership and protect the environment with minimal user-intervention.

Statistics reveals that half of system failures are caused by weak batteries. Our products reduce this failure rate by only keeping batteries that meet Minimal Operational Reserve Energy (MORE). We read the digital capacity of smart batteries and call for calibration if the capacity falls below target. Large batteries are serviced by generating a Nyquist plot that is modeled against a matrix to extract capacity and other SoH data. Matrices for Spectro™ devices will be made available from the Matrix Library.

Cadex achieved much in 40 years; however, preventing unexpected battery failure requires another 40 years of work. Our goal is to strengthen battery inventories by tracking capacity and providing a grace period before failure. Full performance transparency is achievable by evaluating leftover charge against available capacity, a means that also enables the reuse of weaker batteries for lower duties. The secret lies in capacity, the leading health indicator.