Author Topic: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage  (Read 211833 times)

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Offline Fungus

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #525 on: September 04, 2015, 03:08:07 pm »
Can you picture the lawsuits that may arise from that side-affect?  A wedding photographer records entire wedding ceremony.  He uses batterisers for (supposed) better battery life.  Due to batteriser boosting voltage, the camera never displays low battery alert.  Camera dies, file corrupts and never gets saved off.  Photographer gets sued.
They never thought this all the way through, that's obvious by now.

 

Offline Barny

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #526 on: September 04, 2015, 03:17:35 pm »
I've never seen an photographer taking only one picture of a particular scene.
There is always the chance to get an bad picture.
And to corrupt a whole storage medium, the photographer needs much bad luck.
 

Offline 5ky

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #527 on: September 04, 2015, 03:18:49 pm »
I've never seen an photographer taking only one picture of a particular scene.
There is always the chance to get an bad picture.
And to corrupt a whole storage medium, the photographer needs much bad luck.

Wedding photographers do video now

EDIT: they do pictures still like always, but most that I see do video montages as part of the package, granted most DSLR's use lipo packs instead of off-the-shelf AA batteries and such, but it's just an example of what all could happen when your device can't estimate capacity remaining due to the SMPS
 

Offline dr.diesel

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #528 on: September 04, 2015, 03:20:49 pm »
Wedding photographers do video now

I'd instantly fire any photographer that showed up with only a video cam.

Offline PeterL

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #529 on: September 04, 2015, 03:30:51 pm »
I've never seen an photographer taking only one picture of a particular scene.
There is always the chance to get an bad picture.
And to corrupt a whole storage medium, the photographer needs much bad luck.

Wedding photographers do video now

EDIT: they do pictures still like always, but most that I see do video montages as part of the package, granted most DSLR's use lipo packs instead of off-the-shelf AA batteries and such, but it's just an example of what all could happen when your device can't estimate capacity remaining due to the SMPS
This made me think:
DSLR's have a mode to flip the mirror and open the shutter, so you can wipe your sensor. This will only work if your batteries are full, so everything stays open while you are cleaning.
Same thing goes for firmware update's.

And yes, some DSLR (for instance my Pentax K30) can run on AA batteries.
 

Offline Poe

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #530 on: September 04, 2015, 03:33:24 pm »
He claims MOST devices pull a massive surge of current.
Even if we assume that to be true....

Don't have to assume, you can do the math:

The assumption wasn't that Ohms law is correct, rather that MOST products have such poorly designed battery dropout circuits.  The Garmin GPS appears to be one of those edge-cases.  The half dozen products on their website are not.  Makes me wonder how many products they had to test to find one where this worked. 

Actually I might be too hard on Garmin.  When you think about it, Batteriser is using this GPS device way outside of how it was designed.  The batteries are getting hit much harder than normal with the power supply capacitors constantly drained.  In typical operation, the system would mostly pull from the caps then go to sleep.  Like most people only glance at the device then hike/move/etc. 

I'll bet changing that 15second wake-up to 30seconds completely eliminates their results.

 

Offline 5ky

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #531 on: September 04, 2015, 03:37:08 pm »
He claims MOST devices pull a massive surge of current.
Even if we assume that to be true....

Don't have to assume, you can do the math:

The assumption wasn't that Ohms law is correct, rather that MOST products have such poorly designed battery dropout circuits.  The Garmin GPS appears to be one of those edge-cases.  The half dozen products on their website are not.  Makes me wonder how many products they had to test to find one where this worked. 

Actually I might be too hard on Garmin.  When you think about it, Batteriser is using this GPS device way outside of how it was designed.  The batteries are getting hit much harder than normal with the power supply capacitors constantly drained.  In typical operation, the system would mostly pull from the caps then go to sleep.  Like most people only glance at the device then hike/move/etc. 

I'll bet changing that 15second wake-up to 30seconds completely eliminates their results.

Their fake results?  Did you not see the graph I posted above?  (EDIT: oops, I posted that graph in the last page of the debunking thread, not this one--my bad)  I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries. (duracell)  They failed to hit 2 hrs, and I got to 4 hours and had to stop the test due to needing to go to bed, but it was still at 2.55v, 450mv above cutoff, and it was having no problems at all.  They apparently either started with dead cells (which might explain why they plotted current instead of voltage, or they stopped the test when they got the screen dimming warning. 
« Last Edit: September 04, 2015, 03:44:42 pm by 5ky »
 

Offline dcac

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #532 on: September 04, 2015, 03:38:21 pm »
Can you picture the lawsuits that may arise from that side-affect?  A wedding photographer records entire wedding ceremony.  He uses batterisers for (supposed) better battery life.  Due to batteriser boosting voltage, the camera never displays low battery alert.  Camera dies, file corrupts and never gets saved off.  Photographer gets sued.
They never thought this all the way through, that's obvious by now.

A more dreadful and real scenario is smoke detectors, people might believe using Batteriser will make them more secure as the battery could last longer. But in fact all they've done is disabling the smoke detectors low (or faulty) battery warning. And when/if the detector is triggered by fire/smoke it might not sound the alarm for very long cause the battery doesn't have much 'real' energy left.
 

Offline 5ky

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #533 on: September 04, 2015, 03:41:13 pm »
Can you picture the lawsuits that may arise from that side-affect?  A wedding photographer records entire wedding ceremony.  He uses batterisers for (supposed) better battery life.  Due to batteriser boosting voltage, the camera never displays low battery alert.  Camera dies, file corrupts and never gets saved off.  Photographer gets sued.
They never thought this all the way through, that's obvious by now.

A more dreadful and real scenario is smoke detectors, people might believe using Batteriser will make them more secure as the battery could last longer. But in fact all they've done is disabling the smoke detectors low (or faulty) battery warning. And when/if the detector is triggered by fire/smoke it might not sound the alarm for very long cause the battery doesn't have much 'real' energy left.

That's terrifying.  I'm sure there are lots of other applications where this would be either really dangerous or really annoying. 
 

Offline Poe

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #534 on: September 04, 2015, 04:38:40 pm »
...
I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries. (duracell) 
...
 They apparently either started with dead cells (which might explain why they plotted current instead of voltage, or they stopped the test when they got the screen dimming warning.

In their video at the 1:09 mark they show the screen where they stop.  I can't read it.  Would you have gotten the same results if you stopped there?

If yes, that's pretty funny.  Just by ignoring that warning you could probably get 5x the lifespan.  I think that clearly shows how flawed this Batteriser GPS test was.
 

Offline FrankBuss

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #535 on: September 04, 2015, 04:54:29 pm »
In their video at the 1:09 mark they show the screen where they stop.  I can't read it.  Would you have gotten the same results if you stopped there?

If yes, that's pretty funny.  Just by ignoring that warning you could probably get 5x the lifespan.  I think that clearly shows how flawed this Batteriser GPS test was.
Someone found the message in the firmware update file and with this information you can guess that it is the same as seen in the video:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-751-how-to-debunk-a-product-%28the-batteriser%29/msg739118/#msg739118
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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Offline jippie

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #536 on: September 04, 2015, 06:05:43 pm »
I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries.
Are you measuring current, read: "burden voltage"? Surely an extra series resistor will have adverse effect.
 

Offline 5ky

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #537 on: September 04, 2015, 06:21:15 pm »
I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries.
Are you measuring current, read: "burden voltage"? Surely an extra series resistor will have adverse effect.

I am not measuring current for that reason.  I'm curious what value shunt they used.   0.1 ohm?  I might measure current when I retest this weekend.
 

Offline GandalfDerGraue

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #538 on: September 04, 2015, 08:49:21 pm »
One could produce a special high voltage power supply producing output of several hundreds of volts but just being able to deliver a few microamps. That won't operate the monkey either. So would anyone out there (maybe besides batterizer?) tell me that several hundred volts is not enough to drive the monkey?  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/facepalm.gif  Voltage is just voltage but no power. Power is can be seen as something like "Voltage at the presence of n Amperes", so of course you have to draw some current while measuring the operational voltage. And on top of that batteries don't even have some kind of defined Power" they can deliver. Instead of Power it is Energy that a battery has and this means the battery is able to deliver some power for some defined time frame. That automatically means you have to measure the voltage at any given timepoint when the current is drawn by the monkey to get proper values of power, as power is voltage multiplied by actual current at each given point in time..

In the Video with the snail a Manager and vice President, Mr. Roohparvar tries to explain what is going on, he just shows that he not even did understand the proper usage of curves and diagrams nor was he asking his engineers for that. Even my teachers and Professors at Germany were teaching me that of course it has to be the summed up area under the curve! But completely contrary to that Mr. Roohparvar is arguing that you're not just loosing the energy from the area under the curve from the cut-of-point on but tries to tell you it would be the full area of an squared area - not only he can't work with graphs, he seems to confuse voltage, current, and power which are all kind of different things. And, finally, what makes a manager who worked for some "high tech companies" like Western Digital (what do they have to do with batteries anyways?)  as expert on physics or measurement methods or proper engineering? Managers just measure one thing, that is revenue!

I hope everyone now has understood how to properly measure all kinds of power supplies and batteries are just one kind of power supplies. That arguing from batterizer is starting to get more and more ridiculous and I can't help but trying to fight the wrong measurement methods by using proper engineering definitely now is kind of riding dead horses. Batteroo is completely learning-resistent and non informed about proper engineering, otherwise they would clearly show that they would try to defraud their customers by using physical sounding but completely wrong arguments and nonsense to impress with.
 

Offline Ampere

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #539 on: September 05, 2015, 02:34:50 am »
Although I'm getting a bit tired of all the Batteriser nonsense, it does have one positive benefit:
I'm learning a lot about batteries that I didn't even know needed to be taken into account. My textbook mentioned amp-hours and then vaguely touched on internal resistance before completely skipping the rest.

So while all of you electronics veterans are probably bored to tears of all of this battery talk, I like to consider these Batteriser debunking videos to be part of one giant Fundamentals Friday -- which is my favorite EEVBlog segment.
 

Offline Kilrah

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #540 on: September 05, 2015, 10:40:52 pm »
Ugh... it's awfully sad and sickening that once again a blatant lie of which the only asset is "telling people what they want to hear" is able to raise such an amount of money.
Even 10-year old me a couple of decades ago was able to figure out that batteries not able to power my RC car anymore would still be able to run an IR remote or wall clock for a while - but it didn't take much to understand that the actual energy left was no more than a couple of percent, and could only be used at tiny currents (i.e. the opposite of what his thing would do).

That guy needs his "engineering phd" thrown into a paper shreedder, supposing he actually ever got one.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2015, 10:48:54 pm by Kilrah »
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #541 on: September 05, 2015, 11:51:54 pm »
I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries.
Are you measuring current, read: "burden voltage"? Surely an extra series resistor will have adverse effect.

On a proper test on a product you shouldn't use current measurement because:
a) It's not needed. All that matters is the running time
b) It can have an impact due to burden voltage and other contact and lead resistance etc.

If you do current measurement for some reason then the burden of proof (pun intended) lies on the tester to prove it has negligible effect.
 

Offline LabSpokane

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #542 on: September 06, 2015, 01:28:17 am »
I got more than 100% more time out of fresh AA's than they did out of identical brand batteries.
Are you measuring current, read: "burden voltage"? Surely an extra series resistor will have adverse effect.

On a proper test on a product you shouldn't use current measurement because:
a) It's not needed. All that matters is the running time
b) It can have an impact due to burden voltage and other contact and lead resistance etc.

If you do current measurement for some reason then the burden of proof (pun intended) lies on the tester to prove it has negligible effect.

Exactly. I hope the irony of Batteroo's constant harping about internal resistance is not lost on anyone considering they're stuffing a much higher value resistance in series with their power source.
 

Offline Smokey

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Re: EEVblog #779 - How To Measure Product Battery Cutoff Voltage
« Reply #543 on: October 02, 2015, 06:58:05 am »
Probes the monkey sighting in the wild....

 


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