EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage

[AmmoJammo]

I skimmed this one and I will paste below an excerpt from it that might be of some particular interest. You can read the whole thing at the link above if you are more keen than I am.
The spurious emoticon is an accident.

Active load circuitry that drew a fixed 50 mA current was placed at the output of these batteries and the voltage of each battery was measured over time......The amount of time it takes for the batteries to reach 1.39V, which is where a lot of electronic equipment stop operating, are listed.

Thats all I had to read!

[redshift]

I tried to convey they main issues with their video in the simplest way I could despite having no eye for visual design.

[LabSpokane]

Did they edit these videos to remove the professor claim?  I thought I heard it but now I can't seem to find that portion again. 

[redshift]

Did they edit these videos to remove the professor claim?  I thought I heard it but now I can't seem to find that portion again. 

No. At least not yet...

They weirdly uploaded two separate videos of almost the same thing. One has the claim about an EE professor in the description and the other doesn't.

[AmmoJammo]

Did they edit these videos to remove the professor claim?  I thought I heard it but now I can't seem to find that portion again. 

its there!

[LabSpokane]

I skimmed this one and I will paste below an excerpt from it that might be of some particular interest. You can read the whole thing at the link above if you are more keen than I am.
The spurious emoticon is an accident.

Active load circuitry that drew a fixed 50 mA current was placed at the output of these batteries and the voltage of each battery was measured over time......The amount of time it takes for the batteries to reach 1.39V, which is where a lot of electronic equipment stop operating, are listed.

Thats all I had to read!

If a patent is factually incorrect, is it even a valid patent at that point? 

[firewalker]

The description says he is professor of EE. Don't say he is an EE. Maybe he teaches electricity in secondary school.

Alexander.

[pickle9000]

The description says he is professor of EE. Don't say he is an EE. Maybe he teaches electricity in secondary school.

Alexander.

I was thinking preschool.

[Refrigerator]

I almost pissed myself watching Dave beat batteriser to a pulp.

[HKJ]

One thing that got me wondering was if that would allow battery manufacturers to make batteries with different chemistry that otherwise wouldn't be compatible with existing voltages but would allow sufficiently greater energy capacity or cost savings or shelf life. Or even better environmental aspects.

That would not be very practical to use, other chemistries usual has higher voltages and a battery that would fry the device without a converter clamp mounted is not practical.

It is smarter to build the electronic into the battery: http://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Kentli%20AA%202800mWh%20%28Blue%29%20UK.html

[EEVblog]

Active load circuitry that drew a fixed 50 mA current was placed at the output of these batteries and the voltage of each battery was measured over time......The amount of time it takes for the batteries to reach 1.39V, which is where a lot of electronic equipment stop operating, are listed.

Thats all I had to read!

Yup. It's stunning that this is in their patent. That sentence also implies that the voltage was tested under load.
Their claim started out at 1.4V, then 1.35V, then 1.3V (all not under load as they finally had to admit too), and now they have had to admit it's actually 1.1V under load.
 

[EEVblog]

Yeah, that's certainly at the forefront of the controversy. I did find it interesting that they have considered that it could be added to a battery during manufacture. I assume if that were to happen it could be done very cheaply since it would be effectively disposable single use.

Never going to happen, even if it cost nothing to integrate into the battery, because of the simple fact that it would render all battery guages in every product non-functional. Actually worse than non-functional, it would show 100% all the time and then your product dies instantly. No one would buy such a battery that did this.

[Fungus]

Yeah, that's certainly at the forefront of the controversy. I did find it interesting that they have considered that it could be added to a battery during manufacture. I assume if that were to happen it could be done very cheaply since it would be effectively disposable single use.

Don't worry, no reputable battery manufacturer would even consider it.

It would make their batteries a) more expensive, and b) worse.

[Brutte]

Now the question stands: Which scenario is the most favorable for our community?
Of all possible choices I would like to start to list some possible actions:

• a) Make YT presentations showing that, even though Christopher Uken tried hard, Ohm's law does obey and there is nothing he can do about it. Same in Austr..ia.
• b) Write petitions to Indiegogo about their wonky (+800% claim) campaign.
• c) Support Batterizer by buying or advertising this stuff.
• d) Make a series of hilarious YT videos with BUTs, all vacuum lamps on, measurement done by virgins with capacitor earings, etc,
• e) Officially invite Mr. Christopher and/or Mr. Bob into public discussion about their project, on some „neutral ground” (pun intended),
• f) Ask the authorities of the university/ies they represent about the ethical consequences of employing/graduating EE who either do not believe in Ohm's law or lie for profit (or both).
• g) ....
• ....
• z) Let it gogo.

?

I think that either we (the community) can act (a – z) randomly so that everyone can pick for themselves the most appropriate action or we can decide on single coordinated action, maximizing the gain of (our) profit, the pride of being decent without the need for misleading (technically) challenged.

OT: I have changed my personal opinion about „Made in China”. Those products are low quality but I have never heard of some Chinese University researcher to $%^&@# in the BUT for money.

[sakujo7]

Never going to happen, even if it cost nothing to integrate into the battery, because of the simple fact that it would render all battery guages in every product non-functional. Actually worse than non-functional, it would show 100% all the time and then your product dies instantly. No one would buy such a battery that did this.

Can you run 1-wire or a similar interface over the top of a power pin? It would allow for 'smart' batteries that can report an accurate state of charge while still having a carefully-regulated output.

Obviously this is still never going to happen for cheap commercial batteries, but maybe for some sort of long-life industrial applications it could be useful.

[MsJaye]

Hey there Dave,

Rather than attempting to argue the general case with these nitwits, which will always provide room for the sort of marketing sleaze we've been seeing, perhaps it'd be better to get particular.

Have they ever provided a concrete example of a single *specific* product that will meet, say, half of their claim, and will operate for 400% the runtime with the batterizer than without?

Might be prudent to ask for such. They must have at least one example, right?

Jaye.

[AmmoJammo]

Hey there Dave,

Rather than attempting to argue the general case with these nitwits, which will always provide room for the sort of marketing sleaze we've been seeing, perhaps it'd be better to get particular.

Have they ever provided a concrete example of a single *specific* product that will meet, say, half of their claim, and will operate for 400% the runtime with the batterizer than without?

Might be prudent to ask for such. They must have at least one example, right?

Jaye.

They have a video of a GPS.... but their graphs of the current measurements seem really wack.... for some reason, it shows the current draw with the standard battery randomly dropping at one point...

[Mr.B]

I cannot understand how so many people backing this campaign can be so blind to the marketing bullshit.
4,183 of them have thrown away USD222k so far.
Even my 21 year old daughter, who is by no means an EE or physics expert was saying to me – “That looks like bullshit to me Dad”… And that was without any bias or prompting from me. I simply sent her the URL and asked her if she thought it was a good concept.

This is exactly what she said:

“Good concept, but after googling it, some guy called Dave Jones has got some YT saying its bullshit.
I don’t understand exactly what he is doing or saying in some of his videos, but there is a forum site that has a load of people agreeing him.
The thing looks like a bullshit lie to me.”

Then she asks me: “Have you seen the eevblog site?”… I laughed…

In my most humble opinion I believe that Indiegogo are as culpable to fraud as the Batteroo villains.
They (Indiegogo) stand to make money out of this and don’t want to put an end to it regardless of the fact that it is morally wrong to take money off people for snake oil.

To put things into perspective, I have backed campaigns on both IGG and KS, however I have always done my research into the “real” feasibility of the project. Everything I have backed has delivered so far... So I am not at all against the concept of crowd funding, I just think the crowd funding websites need to have a more rigid panel of “sanity checkers” that are looking for the fraudsters.

With the amount of money they are earing they can easily afford to pay a panel of experts in the relative field to veto the application to start a campaign and therefore preserve their own future revenue by only allowing achievable projects, even if they are only mildly achievable.

As IGG and KS become less credible I am far less likely to invest and this will cripple the people who have genuinely sound and clear projects to deliver to the world.

It is a pity the crowd funding sites are so greedy and appear to have deviated from their original moral principles.

My 10c...

[AccountRemovedPerUsersRequest]

Interesting to see an actual product reviewed and tested.

I have started to believe that hoaxes like this can success because it seems that there are lot of people whom "believes everything if it is written on Internet". And if there is couple of videos to confirming the claim,..... it must be certainly true...

Axel.

[BravoV]

<snip>...

“Good concept, but after googling it, some guy called Dave Jones has got some YT saying its bullshit.

This ! 

[SL4P]

There is a positive (+) side-effect to this Batteriser nonsense...
The publicity and trend for Dave's blog posts will raise a lot of new viewers that will be around long after the first battriser product has caught fire!

[MsJaye]

Rather than attempting to argue the general case with these nitwits, which will always provide room for the sort of marketing sleaze we've been seeing, perhaps it'd be better to get particular.

Have they ever provided a concrete example of a single *specific* product that will meet, say, half of their claim, and will operate for 400% the runtime with the batterizer than without?

Might be prudent to ask for such. They must have at least one example, right?

They have a video of a GPS.... but their graphs of the current measurements seem really wack.... for some reason, it shows the current draw with the standard battery randomly dropping at one point...

Indeed. That graph of the regular battery measurements look pretty damn dodgy.

Can anyone identify the exact Garmin GPS used in the video? Dave seems to have an endless supply of GPS units: perhaps some comparison testing might be prudent?

Jaye.

[Joule Thief]

Dave,  You should dig up some sort of motorized toy and some dead batteries and measure the voltage at the battery terminals with the toy off and turned on to show how the voltage on a dead battery drops under load.

I say grab the monkey, have David hold it down on the static mat and put a pair of Pamona probes up the jacksie! 

Done and done!

[jaxbird]

This probably started out as just as a well meaning idea, but then venture capital got involved and promises were made. Now Batteriser have entered the full on scam mode, denying every claim against their product and spreading as much confusing information as possible to keep non technical potential customers on their side.

IMO it is a full on scam at this stage. No one with a degree or even just basic knowledge in EE can justify this device and the claims made by the company.

[vsboost]

What's with that graph ?

Looks like on normal battery the min current slowly ramps up and drops off around the 1:30 mark then dies at 2:00.  Is that normal behaviour for a gps ?