EEVblog #751 - How To Debunk A Product (The Batteriser)

[Brumby]

Tried to watch a bit more...  it was painful.

"The stuff it won't work on is passive load that already has constant current circuitry in it."

                             


Also, I noticed he put up some Youtube like/dislike stats - showing Australia on top with 14 dislikes, then Canada with 8, Romania with 7, Sweden with 6, etc., etc.  What I would like to see is what is above Australia in that list.  There are a few countries missing such as Germany and the U.K. - but most obvious was ... the USA.

"The best way to lie is to tell the truth . . . carefully edited truth."

[Hensingler]

Didn't watch the rest, waste of time as always.

The man is completely batshit crazy. I posted before https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-751-how-to-debunk-a-product-(the-batteriser)/msg1106793/#msg1106793 with an example.

What amuses me is the more people that tell him he is wrong and that batteriseroos don't work the more he believes there is a conspiracy against him and it. It is like a perpetual delusion machine

15 months ago he said he would do tests on some camera he had that 'ate' batteries as soon as he got some batterisers. Now he has some he says in this video he has got (presumably bought specially) the same crappiest digital camera in the world Vivitar used in the Batteroo video. Why? He already had a camera. It seems he is trying to protect his own delusion by buying something he knows will support it.

His comments on the graph are not so wrong. Where he is very wrong is claiming Batteroo are "not hiding notin" and state it shouldn't be used for constant current applications. Batteroo currently make no mention of such limitations on their web site, the first anyone saw was the sheet of paper delivered with them in the box.

[dr_frost_dk]

The most obvious case why the train had such a bad runtime is the current usage vs battery capacity.
Here is a normal duracell graph, and as we can see the capacity goes extra down with 200mA load vs 100mA, and as we know from the efficiency/Voltage in/out tests the current just increases to lower input voltage is, so not only do you have less battery capacity to use just by increasing the current you also have a 10+% loss in the batteriser.



Dave you should do a battery discharge test again like when you wanted to show how little capacity was left in a battery under 1V, would love to see the graph on the batteriser as this will just confirm why the train did so poorly with the batteriser
So please do a 100mA constant current discharge on a regular battery again with graph and one with the same setup with batteriser

[EEVblog]

And would be cool to see your SMU in action to do the characteristics curves for efficiency, input/output voltage curves etc. I know you don't like to write software or setup some complicated test, but some viewers (like me ) might be interested how easy (or complicated) it is to control the outputs of it and read the measurements from a PC with a script, in comparison to EEVblog #957. Once you've done this, the experience you gained from it might be useful for other projects as well (uSupply?).

Sadly you need two SMU's, one for input, one for output.

[EEVblog]

My god... He's back!

He discusses Dave's graph of the train test, starting at minute 5. I don't know, I understand every word he says, but it just doesn't make sense to me. The train is a constant current device? That's clearly wrong. The curve is straight? That's wrong, too, it is clearly a little bit curvy, just use a piece of paper on your TFT screen to verify it. But the main point is that the train doesn't run as long with the sleeve as without the sleeve, nothing to discuss here. And he accuses Dave that there is money behind him, that's silly. Didn't watch the rest, waste of time as always.

Couldn't agree more.
His waffle around his "curve is straight" comment would have had me  ... but he isn't worth it.

Yep, he's not worth the time of day.

[JiggyNinja]

My god... He's back!

The ignorant fucker is accusing Dave of dishonesty.

I also checked out his channel page. The first video is some stupid "Do CATS go to Heaven??" shit.

Then I look on the right and see under Related channels:

The Alex Jones Channel.

I don't know how Youtube chooses those things, but somehow it has saw fit to associate this guy with Alex "False Flag" Jones.

The Alex Jones who thinks that Beyonce is creating videos under CIA direction in order to instigate a race war with the police.

The Alex Jones who thinks that Carrie Fisher might have been murdered by people trying to make money off of her book.

THAT Alex fucking Jones.

However they came to be associated in Youtube's eye, I think that tells you everything you could ever want to know (and many things you most probably don't) about Mr. synergy7.

I need to wash my brain out with Big Clive tearing down some more cheap ebay shit.

[amyk]

I think the only thing left that's more interesting would be to decap the ICs and see what's inside.

[Hensingler]

Data matters.
Those clocks typically get many YEARS battery life. Let's say 3 years (156 weeks)

I measured one. Bench PSU via uA meter to 15,000uF via 10R to the clock. 15,000uF to average current and 10R to simulate internal resistance of a nearly dead battery. 10R might be a bit over the top but can only err on the conservative side.


Voltage Current uA Power uW
1.5     89     134
1.4     80     112
1.3     73     95
1.2     66     79
1.15    64     74
1.125   62     70


1.125 was the lowest it would keep ticking and shorting the 10R only helped a little.  The cut off is quite high so batteriseroo has some energy to extract maybe 20%. The trouble is I estimate average power drawn from the battery will be 135uW with the batteriseroo and 87uW without which more than wipes out the 20%.

The other problem is batteriseroo sleeves cost $2.5 and decent AA batteries 25 cents so even if the sleeve doubled battery life it would take 60 years to break even.

[janekm]

I think the only thing left that's more interesting would be to decap the ICs and see what's inside.

Actually, I'd still be interested in seeing testing on the AA sleeve at higher loads (we really took them to task on the practicality at loads higher than 1A, given that most small boost converters would struggle) to see how they cope, the AAA sleeve did pretty well at 750mA so it'd be interesting to see what the AA one can do.

I'd also be curious about the output ripple, might be fairly decent given the dual-phase converter.

The product may be useless, but it still looks like the chip design team did an impressive job given the constraints 

[Brumby]

I think we are all impressed with the design involved.  Pity the weakness lies with the claims made.

When all is said and done, even if the Batteroo sleeve were to be 100% efficient and "practically perfect in every way", the limiting condition is the battery chemistry.

The Batteroo sleeve never stood a chance.

[SeanB]

With the clock demo, I notice the clock is only shown face up or face down, where even a weak battery, that no longer has the energy to lift the second hand up the face against gravity pulling it down, will still have enough energy to turn the hand.

If you want to use the Batterpoo in a clock, at least get a clock with "continuous movement" where the second hand is running at 8Hz, to give the illusion of a smooth sweep. Those clock mechanisms will on average use a battery every 2 months, while a regular clock will go up to 2 years with a standard AA cell.

I have one in my office, and, after the 4th battery in 3 months, I got tired of this continual change, plus it had a timekeeping that depended on state of charge of the battery, so it ran fast with a new cell, but ran slow as the cell went flat. Gained around a minute a day for the first 2 weeks, then fine for a week and then lost 2 minutes a day as the cell aged out, before going dead with a loss of an hour a day for the last 3 days or so. Took a feed from the cordless phone backup battery ( 12V SLA pack, 2 old alarm chargers, one for the battery, the second to give 5V5 to replace the DECT power brick output) and after a bit of trial and error on resistor values for the red led I settled on 6k8, a red led and a used 1500uF 6V3 non totally dead Crapxon (junk pile parts off an old PC power supply near to hand) across the LED as the voltage it gave the best results on. Now it runs on 1V35, and gives near perfect time keeping.

With the Batterpoo you will also need to look at time keeping accuracy, rather pointless to have a clock running with one when it will have a poor accuracy, only showing the right time every few months. At least a dead regular battery has an indication there is a fault, not a clock that runs, but loses time more and more as it goes on.

[EEVblog]

1.125 was the lowest it would keep ticking and shorting the 10R only helped a little.  The cut off is quite high so batteriseroo has some energy to extract maybe 20%. The trouble is I estimate average power drawn from the battery will be 135uW with the batteriseroo and 87uW without which more than wipes out the 20%.

And therein lies the rub almost every time with the Batteriser. It's a product with almost no upside.
This is why I could easily do a "Top 10 ways the Batteriser FAILS" video, and have virtually nothing left over in which it's genuinely useful. You have to find some niche application and apply it in the right way.

[f4eru]

Yeah, Dave, one last video, then we need to move on. Batteroo debunking is an addiction 

[f4eru]

Speaking of the future, there's a big announcement for the roorparshow :

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/the-next-season-of-the-roohparshaow-is-coming-soon//
 

[Godzil]

My god... He's back!

The ignorant fucker is accusing Dave of dishonesty.

I also checked out his channel page. The first video is some stupid "Do CATS go to Heaven??" shit.

Then I look on the right and see under Related channels:

The Alex Jones Channel.

I don't know how Youtube chooses those things, but somehow it has saw fit to associate this guy with Alex "False Flag" Jones.

The Alex Jones who thinks that Beyonce is creating videos under CIA direction in order to instigate a race war with the police.

The Alex Jones who thinks that Carrie Fisher might have been murdered by people trying to make money off of her book.

THAT Alex fucking Jones.

However they came to be associated in Youtube's eye, I think that tells you everything you could ever want to know (and many things you most probably don't) about Mr. synergy7.

I need to wash my brain out with Big Clive tearing down some more cheap ebay shit.

10 battery / person / year? That's virtually nothing! The 3 billions may look enormous, but if that number is correct, just buy a 10 pack and that the number you are going to use in a year. I seriously doubt that with even the ludicrous 80% more power will really change anything. Just looking around me, if I need 10 battery it's because I have 5 devices that use 2 for each, 3 remote control in this room, plus my multimeter, a thermometer, all of them need either 2 AAA or 2 AA. I need these batterie to operate these devices so..

[Cerebus]

I also checked out his channel page. The first video is some stupid "Do CATS go to Heaven??" shit.

Cats don't so much go to Heaven as stand between the Pearly Gates and debate whether to go in or not. When they do decide, five minutes later they turn up again scratching at the Pearly Gates to be opened to be let in/out again. St Peter has learned some very colourful language since God decided that cats were allowed in Heaven...

[quad]

BTW I finally got my AA Batterisers.
The enthusiasm level to make another video right away is kinda low...

I'd say hold off and not worry about it right now. This whole thing is about having fun and having a few laughs, and some tangential learning. There's more than enough information warning people about the outrageous claims of Batteriser out there, you'd really need to be actively ignoring search results... any serious investor who doesn't stumble across this thread just isn't trying.

Unless there's any interesting testing methods you can teach us, or other value - entertainment value counts! - I'd say it's job done.

PS: The things I enjoyed recently, along this journey, were the calculator hack and monkey debouncing videos, and the OpenCV counting program by Frank.

[Hensingler]

There's more than enough information warning people about the outrageous claims of Batteriser out there, you'd really need to be actively ignoring search results... any serious investor who doesn't stumble across this thread just isn't trying.

Their crappy Vivitar camera video probably isn't bunk. I think it needs to be shown as atypical. I would like to see a similar test on a slightly less crappy camera like

https://www.amazon.com/Kodak-PIXPRO-Friendly-Digital-Optical/dp/B0195XJAZI/

[HKJ]

My review of the batteroo is up: http://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Batteroo%20AA%20UK.html

[dr_frost_dk]

My review of the batteroo is up: http://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Batteroo%20AA%20UK.html

As always awesome work, now i have the graph i was looking for, and as expected the falloff is VERY steep with the batteriser

[Zbig]

If you want to use the Batterpoo in a clock, at least get a clock with "continuous movement" where the second hand is running at 8Hz, to give the illusion of a smooth sweep. Those clock mechanisms will on average use a battery every 2 months, while a regular clock will go up to 2 years with a standard AA cell.

I have one in my office, and, after the 4th battery in 3 months, I got tired of this continual change, plus it had a timekeeping that depended on state of charge of the battery, so it ran fast with a new cell, but ran slow as the cell went flat. Gained around a minute a day for the first 2 weeks, then fine for a week and then lost 2 minutes a day as the cell aged out, before going dead with a loss of an hour a day for the last 3 days or so.[..]

They're not all like that, apparently. I have a continuous movement, DCF77-synced clock. It's still going strong on its first alkaline battery since 10 months now and it has to haul over 15 cm long hands around.

[dr_frost_dk]

Looking forward for the low drain test to complete, if it fails here as well (less then 11-14 days) then it will be VERY hard to find any where the batteriser will help you get more out of your batteries.
Well unless you have some crappy camera that cuts off at 1.2/1.3V


HKJ please post an update when it is done

[HKJ]

HKJ please post an update when it is done

I will, it has reached 9 days now and is between 1.3 and 1.4V.

[dr_frost_dk]

Well going by this graph:

It looks like it will crap out fast when it hits 1.3V when you look at the 0.1A test

[HKJ]

It looks like it will crap out fast when it hits 1.3V when you look at the 0.1A test

It looks like the cell has about the same curve for 0.1A and 0.01A. I do not have time to update it tomorrow, if it finish there, it will be at least 48 hours before I can update with the final curve.