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

[EEVblog]

Everyone, can we simply forget about Wayne and what he has to say about the whole thing? He does not represent Batteriser in any way nor the product.
Talking about him and what he's saying on Facebook does not seem to add any value here.
If he posts public test data then great, re-post it here and we'll discuss the data, but otherwise it's only going to reflect negatively upon this forum.

[Muttley Snickers]

^  I'm with him so you'll have to chuck us both out.

[EEVblog]

Another one:

[ez24]

Another one:

First USA arrival       Looks legit.

Question:  If you hold the battery in your hand (ie no load) and read a 1.2 v on the cell (under  the sleeve) would the batterizer also read 1.2 v because no current is flowing therefore no boost?   The current drain of the meter is too low to turn on the booster?

In other words to test useful voltages the battery has to be under a load?   How much current is needed to turn it on?

[amspire]

Question:  If you hold the battery in your hand (ie no load) and read a 1.2 v on the cell (under  the sleeve) would the batterizer also read 1.2 v because no current is flowing therefore no boost?   The current drain of the meter is too low to turn on the booster?

At no load, I would guess it is 1.5v out. The output capacitor will charge until it reaches 1.5v and then the duty cycle drops to zero. At this point, the regulator may only be using microamps.

[EEVblog]

Question:  If you hold the battery in your hand (ie no load) and read a 1.2 v on the cell (under  the sleeve) would the batterizer also read 1.2 v because no current is flowing therefore no boost?   The current drain of the meter is too low to turn on the booster?
In other words to test useful voltages the battery has to be under a load?   How much current is needed to turn it on?

No, it shouldn't need a load.

[quad]

Sweet, they're out in the wild. Only a matter of time now!!   

[EEVblog]

Sweet, they're out in the wild. Only a matter of time now!!   

I should start gathering gear and test rigs 

[Luminax]

Oh my, finally a sighting of Batteroo in the wild? quick! get the debunking gun!
wait... it has already been debunked... hmmmm

[McBryce]

Sweet, they're out in the wild. Only a matter of time now!!   

I should start gathering gear and test rigs 

And make sure you have the bin nearby for when the tests have been completed

McBryce.

[fubar.gr]

If the Bateroo is boosting voltage 24/7 even when no load is connected, wouldnt that   drain the battery fairly quickly?

[Fungus]

Everyone, can we simply forget about Wayne and what he has to say about the whole thing? He does not represent Batteriser in any way nor the product.

I think we can all agree that:
a) "Represent" or otherwise, he's best friends with Bob.
and
b) No useful information is going to come from that direction. At best some time-wasting experiments that stop half way though for some reason or other.

[Fungus]

If the Bateroo is boosting voltage 24/7 even when no load is connected, wouldnt that   drain the battery fairly quickly?

I've got some $0.35 DC boosters from eBay that go into standby mode when there's less than 1mA draw. In standby mode they use about 60uA (measured by me). At that rate it would take three years to drain a Duracell. It's a drain, yes, but it's not a problem.

Can Batteriser achieve that? Who knows? You'd think Bob would publish figures, but... nooooo.   

[EEVblog]

If the Bateroo is boosting voltage 24/7 even when no load is connected, wouldnt that   drain the battery fairly quickly?

Nope. If they are the least bit competent then it should only be uA's of quiescent current. It would have been part of the spec.
Low quiescent boost converters are common.

[Jay_Diddy_B]

Hi,
Over a year ago I built a circuit which should be a pretty close approximation to a Batteriser. The test results are documented in this message:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/new-project-a-batterruser/msg739968/#msg739968

The one unit I tested had a no-load input current like this:



If you accept 30uA as the average current draw over the life of the battery and a good quality AA cell (Duracell or similar) has a capacity of 2400mAh.

The battery life at no load is 2400m/30u = 80,000 hours

80,000 hours = 3333 days = 9.1 years

This is based on my boost circuit. We need to get a quiescent current measurement of the real Batteriser.

Regards,

Jay_Diddy_B

+1 for discussing the technical issues only.

[Brumby]

Everyone, can we simply forget about Wayne and what he has to say about the whole thing? He does not represent Batteriser in any way nor the product.

I think we can all agree that:
a) "Represent" or otherwise, he's best friends with Bob.

I don't see how him conversing with Batteroo necessarily makes him 'best friends' with Bob.  If he is seeking the option to become a distributor, then he is certainly going to be cultivating an amicable business relationship.  Having an open mind about the sleeve kinda goes with that.  This statement is speculative.

and
b) No useful information is going to come from that direction. At best some time-wasting experiments that stop half way though for some reason or other.

In engineering terms, I agree any information tended is likely to be inconclusive - but it might well be the sort of thing that could click with the public.  And that's the thing ... the success or otherwise of the Batteroo sleeve will not come from a datasheet - it will come from the perception from the people who will buy them.  Engineers will be able to explain that result.


I do agree, however, that we don't need to drag Wayne through any more mud.  We really should be focussing on the sleeve - and since there seems to be more of them surfacing, I would imagine the opportunity for Dave to get his hands on some will come soon enough.

[Brumby]

I was going to say something about quiescent current - but there's no need now.

[ccs46]

REVIVE BATTERIES – A Credible and Honest Business that Sells Batteries.

Can Credible, Honest, and Business that Sells Batteries be in the same sentence?

[Cerebus]

In engineering terms, I agree any information tended is likely to be inconclusive - but it might well be the sort of thing that could click with the public.  And that's the thing ... the success or otherwise of the Batteroo sleeve will not come from a datasheet - it will come from the perception from the people who will buy them.  Engineers will be able to explain that result.

But will they? There's a discussion been going on elsewhere on the board about bad writing in science. I'm sorry to say that a lot, possibly the majority, of scientists and engineers are lousy at communicating science and engineering to the general public. We make a lot of assumptions and tend to come at a topic with baggage.

For example. It's obvious to you and me that in a torch there's a time/brightness trade off that affects battery life and that's the kind of assumption that we take into a conversation with the general public. A member of the general public will most probably not innately understand that and fail to see an argument against the Batteroo that depends on that assumption.

There's a real art to 'popular science' journalism or advocacy that treads a fine line between explaining important assumptions, not providing too much information, putting things in terms that the public can understand, not over simplifying etcetera. Consider how many politicians still don't get that you can have secure cryptography or back doors but not both, and yet they've had advice from some of the worlds foremost experts. If you can't explain something to a bunch of generally intelligent people that's vital to public security and safety (i.e. they have a strong incentive to get it right) then what are the chances with the general public?

Don't get me wrong, it is possible, but the presentation has to be made by a person with the right skill set and is much, much harder to do than one might first think. One needs to boil the whole thing down to where it could be presented in a three minute spot in a video or TV consumer issues programme and the general public would still 'get it'. That to my mind is a tall order.

I'll leave you with an example from my own life. I used to be in the ISP business and I also used to be a tech writer. Back in my ISP days I'd see a lot of support calls that had at their nub a lack of customer understanding of DNS - what it did and how it worked. I set out to write a short explainer that the support staff could fire off at customers who had problems. If I'd been writing it for thee and me, generally techie people, I could have rattled it off in an afternoon. Targeting it at a general audience meant that it took about three days actual writing and then several rounds of making sure that the target audience 'got it' and revising accordingly. I'm a quick writer, I used to bang out 20-40 thousand 'publication ready' words a month and actually edit a magazine section at the same time, but the level of meticulous care needed in getting a highly technical subject just right for a general audience increased the workload by at least a factor of five.

For the avoidance of doubt I am not volunteering. I doubt I'm the man and moreover my late father, a former regular army sergeant, would be horrified if his son hadn't learned the basic lesson of "never volunteer for anything" from his dad.

[AlxDroidDev]

(...)  And that's the thing ... the success or otherwise of the Batteroo sleeve will not come from a datasheet - it will come from the perception from the people who will buy them.  Engineers will be able to explain that result.

At the start, yes, you are right. In the medium\long run, however, the product has to satisfy that perception. If the product falls short on the promises, those almost 8,000 IGG backers might be all the customers Batteroo will ever have. Marketing specialists will help engineers explain that!   

Back to the technical aspects, I was wondering if a electronic load with logging capabilities could help compare the performance of the batteroo with a regular battery, using two batteries from the same package. Suppose the e-load could use a fixed current and power, and let voltage vary in time, and have all these variables logged.  Would that be a proper test? Specifically, this and this are what I have in mind:

[Fungus]

In engineering terms, I agree any information tended is likely to be inconclusive - but it might well be the sort of thing that could click with the public.  And that's the thing ... the success or otherwise of the Batteroo sleeve will not come from a datasheet - it will come from the perception from the people who will buy them.  Engineers will be able to explain that result.

If it was 'conclusive' in public terms then why all the secrecy from Bob? Why all those deceptive videos? Just show 20 gadgets running longer, job done.

[FrankBuss]

Back to the technical aspects, I was wondering if a electronic load with logging capabilities could help compare the performance of the batteroo with a regular battery, using two batteries from the same package. Suppose the e-load could use a fixed current and power, and let voltage vary in time, and have all these variables logged.  Would that be a proper test? Specifically, this and this are what I have in mind:

Looks good, Vbus would then connected to the output of the sleeve? What does R2 and C18?

And in addition to the current, you should measure the output voltage of the battery and the voltage after the sleeve. No need for complex logging with SD card etc., I would just output the 3 numbers on the serial console and then save it and display some nice curves in a spreadsheet program, as I did here:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-751-how-to-debunk-a-product-%28the-batteriser%29/msg743529/#msg743529

Using the reference voltage source makes it more accurate than my solution (especially because the MAX6126 has a very low temperature coefficient, much better than needed for the ADCs), but you should calibrate it, too.

[rrinker]

...
There's got to be a reasonable expectation for criticism if you run a CrowdFunding campaign and take Average Joe's money, run 18 months+ behind what was promised, all while having almost ZERO worthwhile communication on the developments of the product.
...

 I think this says it all. Had Bob & Co simply been up front and honest over all this time instead of every month promising to ship and then coming up with yet another excuse to push it off, a lot of this fiasco could have been avoided. Would people complain about the delays? Of course they still would. But if FREQUENT HONEST answers were provided, there wouldn't have been all sorts of crazy speculation. This thread wouldn't be 278 pages and growing (ok, so we would have less entertainment, and eaten a lot less popcorn  ). There wouldn't have been any reason to doubt that someone actually had product in hand once it finally did ship.
 It's been said over and over - I don;t think anyoen here douts that the thing WORKS - at question is the level they claim it will work vs physical reality. The REAL fiasco here has been the lack of communications and vague excuses when there has been communications.
 I once worked for a company run by two partners. One was completely honest and open about what was going on in the business. The other was like Bob - no one needs to know anything, it's being handled, don't worry about it. After a number of years, the friction between the two became too great and they decided to dissolve the partnership. The Bob-like partner would agree to a separation under one condition - he got me as an employee. The other partner could have everyone else.  The first partner was planning to carry on the business as is, the Bob guy was going to start a new company in a similar line of work (we were a computer consulting company). Bob (not his real name but it works here) would frequently take me to lunch and talk about how great this new venture he was working on was going to be, how he had a really great business plan and it was all set, and with my help it would soar. But he never shared any of this business plan, not even what he was really doing. Which, it turns out, was buying a company that specialized in accounting software and adding the computer and networking part (me, as sole employee with that skill set at first). Long story short, I found another job because I didn't want to work for this guy for many reasons, but I planned to give him a month notice so he could at least get his venture off the ground. But then he  went back and forth over some really minor details about the split and it dragged on for 3 more weeks before they both signed the papers. So he got 1 week out of me (I had already committed a start date with my new company). He was of course not happy at all (he even attempted to not pay me for the week I worked there, but one call from a lawyer fixed that) - but this is how secretive he was about everything - I did not know the name of the company nor the address until AFTER the separation papers were signed! The total lack of any real communications throughout this Batteroo fiasco just reminded me of that period in my life.

[amirm]

On quiescent current, back in 1980s I designed a product that did not have a true off button but rather, would go to sleep, consuming microamps.  It ran on four AA cells.  I was worried that this current consumption would shorten the battery life.  To my surprise I found documentation from Duracell that said consumption of tiny amount of current actually lengthened the battery life than not using it at all!  Did not dig into the reason why and quick search now shows nothing.

[quad]

Another!