The actual switching frequency will be high - perhaps 1.5MHz. It would be good if you can see what the frequency actually is. I don't think anyone has actually measured it yet. It is almost certainly between 1MHz and 2MHz and it will probably be most noticeable at a high load.
One of the other things I am interested to see is how quickly the converter wakes. If you switch a high load on suddenly, how low does the voltage drop?
I don't even have a clue how much current the Batteriser can output yet so I don't know if a high current is 100mA or 1A. Due to the very low quiescent current, the wake up circuitry may be very slow, and if the voltage can drop to zero when the load is switched on, that would be a pretty big disaster.
This last waveform shows how the batteriser switches, which is 7 times in this instance during the rising edge. After that de DC-DC converter goes to sleep, because the output voltage got to high.
During the rising edge, between the spikes you see little dents. That is clearly the point where the inductor is charged. The dents are slightly less then 1 us apart, which gives a switching frequency of 1.2Mhz or so.
Try zooming in further on the rising edge, and is should become clearer.
1A load, 33µs wake up time, dropping down to 750mV
fully recovered after around 60µs but it is struggling to keep up the voltage, idling at around 1.2V (sorry, forgot to move the horizontal cursor..)
judging from those curves, can we assume that 1A load is to much and even 500mA is near the border of "to much"?
My simple light bulb test mentioned hereThanks to Frank I got a Batterizer in the mail today. Testing with two incandescent light bulbs side by side right now.
showed unexpected problems. The light bulbs powered by the batteriser keep on failing. I thought about a bad batch but until now the batterised bulbs died five times while the non-batterised bulb is not affected at all, keeps glowing as it should. I swapped the bulbs to see if I was just lucky with the still working bulb at the normal battery, but no, the bulb that has never been used on a batteriser blew up after around an hour being used on the batteriser, while the former "batterised" bulb is still glowing. strange. Has already somebody measured the noise coming from those things? are there major switching spikes that could potentially blow up the bulb?
The light bulbs powered by the batteriser keep on failing. I thought about a bad batch but until now the batterised bulbs died five times while the non-batterised bulb is not affected at all, keeps glowing as it should. I swapped the bulbs to see if I was just lucky with the still working bulb at the normal battery, but no, the bulb that has never been used on a batteriser blew up after around an hour being used on the batteriser, while the former "batterised" bulb is still glowing. strange. Has already somebody measured the noise coming from those things? are there major switching spikes that could potentially blow up the bulb?
Sure, lightbulbs suffer greatly from overvoltage, nothing new here, but the ones I used were rated at 1V5 and the batterizer is outputting 1.51V RMS. So that SHOULD be ok, at least if those bulbs are definitely 1V5 rated and not "to use with 1V5 batteries", as I can only read the marking on the bulb itself which states 1,5V.
Even if they were not designed to run at a constant 1V5, they shouldn't just fail after around half an hour, should they? Also, I had two batches, three came with the package from frank, and just for comparison I bought another set of four at the local conrad store.
Here I zoomed into the actual switching, which happenes indeed with around 1.2MHz with no load.
The actual average running voltage does play a huge role in bulb life, but so can flakey, modulating, dirty power. If you've ever seen a flakey mains wall switch controlling a standard tungsten bulb lamp, it will burn out bulbs very quickly yet the flickering it causes is usually almost imperceptible even if you know to look for it.
Would a camera flashgun, a big one like a NIKON SB-700, be a worthwhile test? They are a pretty high drain device but also one that is not a continuous drain so the battery chemistry has some recovery time. It would test a device that photographers would use in a cold climate outdoors so the temperature effect on battery life could be included to see if Batteroo can add some benefit.
Alkaline batteries in flashguns tend to be removed because recycle time gets too long. So the Batteroo would be tested in circumstances where the battery isn't already completely exhausted.
that SHOULD be ok, at least if those bulbs are definitely 1V5 rated and not "to use with 1V5 batteries"
The actual average running voltage does play a huge role in bulb life, but so can flakey, modulating, dirty power. If you've ever seen a flakey mains wall switch controlling a standard tungsten bulb lamp, it will burn out bulbs very quickly yet the flickering it causes is usually almost imperceptible even if you know to look for it.
Interesting, maybe this is another reason they don't recommend using it with passive devices like light bulbs. It not only runs shorter, it actually destroys the devices in some cases.
I just watched Daves latest live stream of the Bateroo testing in the trains. It wasn't until Dave was wrapping up and he mentioned testing the Batteroo in an active device, which I take it was the MP3 test, and a passive device which I presume is the train that it dawned on me that in order to light the LED on the front of the train there must have been some sort of active circuitry in the - passive - train to allow a AAA battery to light an LED.
Likely it's just an LED without any active circuitry. Single cell, 1.6-0.9V, no active circuitry needed to run a basic LED for the purposes of this toy.
Edit: I suppose it depends on what you mean by "active" circuitry... Do a torroid, a transistor, and a resistor count as active? I suppose the transistor does make it active, technically?
From a side-by-side testing of the toy train, the velocity was pretty constant due to the Batteriser.
But surprisingly the train without the Batteriser was constant too.
Very clear representation of the data there, good job
Here's another way to look at the data: Laps per minute over time:
Edit: Slight fix to zero lap with no batteroo.
From a side-by-side testing of the toy train, the velocity was pretty constant due to the Batteriser.
But surprisingly the train without the Batteriser was constant too.That's something Batteroo could have posted, leaving out the flat line after the battery with the sleeve died, I'm sure they will quote you. It shows clearly that it is much better with the sleeves. Breaking news: "famous blogger David Jones admits that the Batteroo sleeve increases the performance, see the video and the the graph he created". How much did they pay you for this?
Cheers. I suppose the question is, would little Johnny notice the difference in speed for that first hour and a half or so (with vs without Batteroo), and would Johnny want to keep playing with the toy in the second hour when it's slowed to 2-3 laps per minute, vs 3-4 laps per minute? Or would he ask mum for new batteries at that point anyway?
another picture, just a bit more zoomed in.