[subudeepak]

I understand what you mean. But in my remote, the batteries are not arranged in serial; they are arranged in parallel. That being the case, my remote can see both terminals of a given battery. Hence, I fail to see, as to why the mechanism cannot be implemented as part of such devices..

The same applies to my wall-clock (which uses a single battery)

[jacquesm]

They can be. And in fact, in plenty of electronic devices they are since operating from a variable supply voltage is not an option so the typical battery powered device uses dc-dc converter like the one in the article only it does not operate on a single cell but on all cells in series. And that works just fine.

[wyldfire]

> But in my remote, the batteries are not arranged in serial; they are arranged in parallel

Are you sure? That's pretty uncommon. Are the poles oriented in the same direction or opposite ones? Is one set of poles connected to a pair of terminals shared by a single conductor and the other set using two distinct terminals?

[subudeepak]

It looks just like this :) http://s289.photobucket.com/user/stranger205/media/battery_s...

[wyldfire]

Yeah, that's in series.