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

[amspire]

Are they designing a new chip, or are they trying to source an available part in chip form? They do not have the height for any packaged chip.

[SeanB]

Clamp is only separated from the battery positive by 2 thin plastic sleeves, so it might get a benefit from the small capacitance. Though I do agree that a 1k test load only means the converter will run in a hiccup mode, so it likely only was emitting a few short pulses of energy, which integrate to a low emission as the test is not too sensitive to low frequency impulse noise as it scans the band.

This FCC test was for marketing purposes only. They needed a test report with the words "Batteriser", "FCC", and "Passed" in it, just to react on comments made by these nasty EE's

And since they designed a whole new IC for the batteriser (ahum) this FCC test is now useless anyway.

I was looking at this report, and I am very suspicious of the spurii at the frequency of older GSM and CDMA cellular phones, along with the almost total lack of any testing below 30MHz, where most noise will be emitted. Also the battery used is very suspicious, either they stripped the label off an Energiser or Duracell alkaline cell to not have a brand, or they wanted to thin out the dielectric of the radiating connector strip to that of the sleeve insulation alone, to double the capacitance it provides for RF attenuation. Were they all standing around outside the test chamber talking on their assorted phones to others during the test, the varying nature of the RF looks like that.

[jancumps]

...

It was a bad result, and I'm sure they and the investors were not happy. They extended the campaign for a few extra weeks to try and rake in some more doh, but it didn't work.
The money they got is chump change to a professional VC funded start-up like this.
The whole plan went to crap on them. They didn't count on the poor funding result, and they most certainly didn't count on being challenged by the entire engineering community, how annoying!

You live. You learn.

[Fungus]

The whole plan went to crap on them.

You live. You learn.

You don't tell lies. You don't try to sell ripoff bullshit products.

[jancumps]

Yes. Is should have added "... with someone else's money."

[Godzil]

Nobody here sees 800% in any real world application and you'd be lucky to find anyone who feels that there is any real practical benefit.

They are saying 80% now not 800%.
There does not look like there is much left under 1.0v

They are still claiming only 20% of a batteries capacity is used in a typical product.
The reason they use is pulse currents causing products to drop out at 20% of used battery capacity 

Which is correct with a really badly designed product (and I never met one) and even in this case you just need to restart the product and it will work until the next spike.

So..

[mikerj]

Which is correct with a really badly designed product (and I never met one) and even in this case you just need to restart the product and it will work until the next spike.

So..

Some of the older digital cameras that used AAs would only take a few shots with new alkaline cells fitted due to very high peak currents.

A Batteriser almost certainly wouldn't be able to supply the peak currents required, so would likely stop the camera working at all.

[amspire]

A Batteriser almost certainly wouldn't be able to supply the peak currents required, so would likely stop the camera working at all.

From my understanding of the patents, the Batteriser generates a voltage in series with the battery. When a battery has a high internal resistance because it is exhausted, there is nothing the Batteriser can with high pulsed currents since the battery is still in series. The Batteriser has to try and put out its greatest output power at the point there is a minimal voltage across the battery - that is not believable.

I think there may have been some good engineer involved with the Batteriser. I think they have had some kind of working prototype which would be impressive even if it can only do 200mA. I think the PCBs are not a fibreglass substrate - I think they are a thin aluminium substrate with very thin fibreglass layers each side. If that engineer exists, we would love to talk to him/her. That engineer would know exactly what the Batteriser can and cannot do. Instead all we hear is bogus marketing twaddle.

[rrinker]

 Batterizer's 'engineers' are a bunch of PhDs who call non-PhD engineers like Dave idiots because they cannot grasp this miraculous breakthrough they have made. No really, go back to the early pages of this thread and see their response to Dave's videos showing his experiments and test results proving this is utter rubbish. This is an all too common occurrence - if you've followed the thread on the Triton gill thing, anyone presenting evidence of how it cannot possibly work as presented are called haters. Hell, if Dave really were as far up the arse of 'Big Battery' as Batterizer might like you to think, he really could have bought the old Altium building for a new lab. 

[amspire]

In that case, I suspect there was one non-Phd guy who had to sit at the tiny desk next to the toilets who is the only one that has actually ever built anything. He would have done their first prototype. The PhD's have probably sacked him by now for not understanding the big concept either. So now there is no-one left who can do anything but wave their hands in an impressive PhD way and talk in a way that mortals cannot possibly understand because they are just too stupid.

[rrinker]

 The engineers responsible for this product have been sacked and replaced by llamas.....

[AmmoJammo]

Is it normal for unapproved/hidden from page visitors posts to be visible?

[EEVblog]

Some of the older digital cameras that used AAs would only take a few shots with new alkaline cells fitted due to very peak currents.
A Batteriser almost certainly wouldn't be able to supply the peak currents required, so would likely stop the camera working at all.

Of course it won't work. No way in hell an ultra tiny boost converter like that can match the IR of NiMH cells.
IRCC in their long "technical" video they show the current spikes on a camera as an example, but didn't put the Batteriser in to actually show it works 

[amspire]

The camera's programmers would have code that safely shuts down a camera when the battery is low, as they know the voltage never disappears in an instant. They can make sure shutters are in a safe position, that CCD protectors are back in position, that memory writes complete so that the memory does not get corrupted. The Batteriser will shut down in an instant - even in the middle of a shot - which will bypass all the camera's normal software protections.

[EEVblog]

They are still claiming only 20% of a batteries capacity is used in a typical product.
The reason they use is pulse currents causing products to drop out at 20% of used battery capacity 

Which is correct with a really badly designed product (and I never met one)

Correct. Theoretically possible, but finding a real product that does that in the wild would be very hard.
Most battery powered products are:
a) Designed correctly to get at least decent battery life
and
b) Have regulators, bypassing caps, and low voltage dropout circuits etc that handle any required pulse currents just fine. Which is why on all but niche examples, using a power supply to measure the battery cutoff voltage is and industry standard way to do test for battery cutoff voltage. Indeed, the one method that actually lets you easily test what the actual cutoff voltage of the product circuitry is.

Digital cameras that weren't designed for alkalines that need huge charging currents for the photoflash are the only obvious candidate that comes to mind.

[EEVblog]

The camera's programmers would have code that safely shuts down a camera when the battery is low, as they know the voltage never disappears in an instant. They can make sure shutters are in a safe position, that CCD protectors are back in position, that memory writes complete so that the memory does not get corrupted. The Batteriser will shut down in an instant - even in the middle of a shot - which will bypass all the camera's normal software protections.

Yup. Even if the Batterieser actually works (and I'm sure it does as a boost converter as claimed, up to some given current), you cannot escape the fundamental flaw in the entire concept, which is instant product shutdown without warning. Right there it's a dead-duck product people will not use once they realise how shitty that "feature" is.

[EEVblog]

2nd person claiming to have gotten a refund?


Love the second comment 

[Godzil]

They are still claiming only 20% of a batteries capacity is used in a typical product.
The reason they use is pulse currents causing products to drop out at 20% of used battery capacity 

Which is correct with a really badly designed product (and I never met one)

Correct. Theoretically possible, but finding a real product that does that in the wild would be very hard.
Most battery powered products are:
a) Designed correctly to get at least decent battery life
and
b) Have regulators, bypassing caps, and low voltage dropout circuits etc that handle any required pulse currents just fine. Which is why on all but niche examples, using a power supply to measure the battery cutoff voltage is and industry standard way to do test for battery cutoff voltage. Indeed, the one method that actually lets you easily test what the actual cutoff voltage of the product circuitry is.

Of course, that what I had in mind by saying that I've never met one, even the old and honorable Gameboy just makes it's power LED to flick to tell that the battery are low, but not shutdown the product.

As I says way ago, a batterizer with a configurable (manually or automatically) output voltage to
- tell that the battery is going down
- make sure that the differential voltage does not get absurdly high, like 0.7V when boosting from 0.8V to 1.5V
That may works a bit better, will not make it's assertions of course, but at least would prevent prevent device from shutting without warning.

[Cerebus]

Batterizer's 'engineers' are a bunch of PhDs who call non-PhD engineers like Dave idiots because they cannot grasp this miraculous breakthrough they have made. No really, go back to the early pages of this thread and see their response to Dave's videos showing his experiments and test results proving this is utter rubbish. This is an all too common occurrence - if you've followed the thread on the Triton gill thing, anyone presenting evidence of how it cannot possibly work as presented are called haters. Hell, if Dave really were as far up the arse of 'Big Battery' as Batterizer might like you to think, he really could have bought the old Altium building for a new lab. 

Well, yes and no. Somewhere behind all this is some poor sod of an actual engineer who is trying to get out of the door, while knowing that it is impossible, some semblance of what marketing, sales and management have promised. We've never heard from, or seen, that engineer - we've only heard from marketing, sales and management. Anybody who's been responsible for the actual design and production of a real product in the real world will recognise this situation, it's just that the Batteriser farce is in a whole new league.

[Sonny_Jim]

So, what's their plan?  Make as many as possible in the first run, get them out on store shelves before all the crap reviews pour in and run with the money?

[FrankBuss]

Well, yes and no. Somewhere behind all this is some poor sod of an actual engineer who is trying to get out of the door, while knowing that it is impossible, some semblance of what marketing, sales and management have promised. We've never heard from, or seen, that engineer - we've only heard from marketing, sales and management. Anybody who's been responsible for the actual design and production of a real product in the real world will recognise this situation, it's just that the Batteriser farce is in a whole new league.

In the companies for which I worked, marketing and sales sometimes promised features and deadlines to customers without asking the developers first, but usually they know what is physically impossible.

[miguelvp]

So, what's their plan?  Make as many as possible in the first run, get them out on store shelves before all the crap reviews pour in and run with the money?

What money? if they actually fulfill their orders the manufacturing costs shipping etc will eat up those $400K quick.

A lot of people think their plan is to ship them and quickly sell the intellectual property for a big profit to some sap.
 

[Cerebus]

Well, yes and no. Somewhere behind all this is some poor sod of an actual engineer who is trying to get out of the door, while knowing that it is impossible, some semblance of what marketing, sales and management have promised. We've never heard from, or seen, that engineer - we've only heard from marketing, sales and management. Anybody who's been responsible for the actual design and production of a real product in the real world will recognise this situation, it's just that the Batteriser farce is in a whole new league.

In the companies for which I worked, marketing and sales sometimes promised features and deadlines to customers without asking the developers first, but usually they know what is physically impossible.

I've worked with a lot of salesmen who have absolutely no clue what the difference between physically possible and impossible is and don't have the sense to ask first.

[EEVblog]

So, what's their plan?  Make as many as possible in the first run, get them out on store shelves before all the crap reviews pour in and run with the money?

It's almost certain that's what they were hoping for, hence the K-Mart President on the board who has now shot through and it seems they have no consumer retail deal that would have made it all commercially viable. They are up the proverbial brown creek without a paddle.

[LabSpokane]

So, what's their plan?  Make as many as possible in the first run, get them out on store shelves before all the crap reviews pour in and run with the money?

It's almost certain that's what they were hoping for, hence the K-Mart President on the board who has now shot through and it seems they have no consumer retail deal that would have made it all commercially viable. They are up the proverbial brown creek without a paddle.

Bros Roohparvar forgot to bring a canoe as well.