Mouse test, with both NiMh and an Alkaline battery.
Extra 19min on NiMh
Alkaline with a measured 1.16V dropout under load.
Not a controlled test, but said he got about an extra 6 hours use from a dead battery. 26 days for a new battery without Batteriser. That's 1% extra run time!
In the video he said he probably used it for 100 hours in the 26 days, and at the end he guessed 5%-10% extra time.
Can't wait to see your Garmin GPS test to see the first independent product test with 800% improvement
So, basically that gets cancelled out by the conversion losses if you were to put the batteroo on a new battery.
The video also shows that the battery gauge is rendered almost useless, that it's hard work inserting or removing the batteroo-encased cell, and that the batteroo positive tab gets bent after the first use. Any user is going to break it way before the break-even point, assuming they don't get fed up of the rigmarole of inserting and removing the thing.
Dave
So, basically that gets cancelled out by the conversion losses if you were to put the batteroo on a new battery.
Yes, I don't anyone has yet to find a device (apart from Batteroo themsleves) that device operates longer with the Batteriser on a fresh set of cells.
You just need to find a device with a cutoff voltage of like 1.3 V (80% power left in the battery). The output voltage is above 1.3 V for battery voltage down to 1 V, so it should run much longer, even when considering only 90% efficiency as measured by dexters_lab. If someone has too much time, with the Vout/Vin graphs, the efficiency graphs and a battery discharge curve, someone could create a formula (or maybe easier a simple program) that outputs the factor for a given load and cutoff voltage. E.g. for a constant power load of x Watt, there is a cutoff voltage where the factor is 1 and below that the factor is less than 1. Of course, there are not many such devices.
The mouse in the video uses LEDs and only one 1.5V battery so it must have a boost converter inside. If the internal booster stops working none of the LEDs will work, this includes the one for motion detection. The batteriser was only able to run the mouse for a few minutes longer indicating the booster in the mouse stops working at a slightly higher voltage than the booster in the batteriser.
This makes this mouse test a good test for pointing out that the batteriser is useless in devices with internal boost converter.
It however is a bad test for pointing out the batteriser doesn’t do what it claims. Only devices without internal boost converters, like the train test, should be used for these tests.
CJ
Oh course its not working for frank buss and dave. You have to say a prayer first and you also have to believe in it. If you don't believe its not going to work. They make this very clear on their website. I wonder how much money the company has lost since these videos. But I think the majority of people who watch these videos already know it sounds like bullshit.
Still no word from Zeptobars... I thought a batteriser was sent more than a month ago by Dexters_lab.
Curious to see the die. Any news about this?
Still no word from Zeptobars... I thought a batteriser was sent more than a month ago by Dexters_lab.
Curious to see the die. Any news about this?
no heard anything so far, i'll ping him and see if there is an ETA
I may have missed it, but have any of the media outlets that praised this as the "worlds greatest new product" circled back to do a review themselves of a working product?
a total of zero media outlets have done this.
Still no word from Zeptobars... I thought a batteriser was sent more than a month ago by Dexters_lab.
Curious to see the die. Any news about this?
no heard anything so far, i'll ping him and see if there is an ETA
was delivered to zeptobars on the 6th april, took nearly a month to arrive!!
that's the reason for the delay
Looks like some people are still trying to defend the sleeves, latest comment on my toy train test video:
Dave, can't remember, did you do a teardown of your toy train?
Dave, can't remember, did you do a teardown of your toy train?
Yep, posted photos somewhere on here. It has a motor, a deduction gearbox and a grain of wheat light bulb.
That guy is clueless.
I would like to see a cheap toy train that has CV circuity. AFAIK most of the expensive model trains do their "regulation" through the tracks. Can't fathom how someone would even get to that idea, unless you have shares.
But, as a question, what would be an applicable product for this "technology"? Mice have ASICs that can work to low voltages, cameras have a boost converter, most other stuff is either mostly resistive (toy train) or use standard CMOS/TTL circuitry.
As a note, the mirage of "fully charged" batteries makes another victim. The '8-bit guy' got a Nintendo Camera with original (>20yo) batteries which measured 1.55V but didn't actually work. Alkaline batteries are really treacherous...
Still no word from Zeptobars... I thought a batteriser was sent more than a month ago by Dexters_lab.
Curious to see the die. Any news about this?
Sorry for keeping you all waiting:
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/BTR004K-Batteriser-Batteroo-switched-capacitor-boost-dcdc
Terrific, glad to finally see it! I was so sure we were going to find an IC vendor's marking inside, amazing that it really seems to be a totally custom job. Whoever designed it clearly did an amazing job, I just hope they had the foresight to include some kind of configuration option for other output voltage (ranges)
I just hope they had the foresight to include some kind of configuration option for other output voltage (ranges)
Unlikely, they specify 1.8V as maximum voltage. They likely used 1.8V transistors in the design (lowest resistance per unit of area).
But derivative design could have been made with 3.3-5V transistors.
Still no word from Zeptobars... I thought a batteriser was sent more than a month ago by Dexters_lab.
Curious to see the die. Any news about this?
Sorry for keeping you all waiting:
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/BTR004K-Batteriser-Batteroo-switched-capacitor-boost-dcdc
great work! thanks for decapping this one and posting it up, really interesting to see under the cover!
given the custom design and the effort gone into packaging it into the sleeve it seems they really did put effort into designing the batteriser to work well, such a shame the theory that underpins it is just flawed
given the custom design and the effort gone into packaging it into the sleeve it seems they really did put effort into designing the batteriser to work well, such a shame the theory that underpins it is just flawed
The technology is very impressive. In terms of idle current and current capacity for the voltages, it seems to be way ahead of anything else on the market. We are talking about being much better then the best that Linear Technology, Analog Devices, Microchip Technologies and Maxim can do. An amazing technical achievement
If the design was tweaked, it could be one of the best low voltage boost converter chips available. I am a huge fan of AA and AAA cells - they have been around for over 60 years and will be here for many decades to come. For devices that use low power, that need easily replaceable batteries or that can be used for decades, AA and AAA are the best. With modern efficiency, it is possible to power useful devices of just one AA or AAA battery cell. With the very low idle current on this boost converter, the converter does not need to be switched off, making controller soft power switching possible.
There is not currently a decent converter chip on the market that can do this. The idle current is too high, and the maximum output current when the battery is at 0.9v is often pretty low. A modified Batterizer chip could be perfect.
I just hope they had the foresight to include some kind of configuration option for other output voltage (ranges)
Unlikely, they specify 1.8V as maximum voltage. They likely used 1.8V transistors in the design (lowest resistance per unit of area).
But derivative design could have been made with 3.3-5V transistors.
Weren't they in the process of making a 9V Batteriser?
They in fact promised to deliver one to every IGG backer.
I remember something about Fitipower's IC at the other thread... perhaps if someone can get their hands on one so we can do a die comparison
A little necroposting because I promised an update when the time came.
One of the items much discussed was the Apple wireless keyboard. So, back in February, the 17th to be precise, I put two new Duracell Industrial alkaline AAs in my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. After a few weeks of low battery warnings, starting at an indicated 10% according to Apple's drivers, today it got to 4% and I decided it was finally time to change the batteries.
Interestingly, the unloaded voltage of the cells I just took out were 1.16V and 1.17V (10Mohm meter, so a tiny load ~120nA) - suspiciously close to the 1.2V figure Batteroo were always flinging about, perhaps it's where they got that figure from initially.
This is one of the rare occasions where measuring a cell's unloaded voltage is probably justified as that's what the keyboard itself is most likely going to be measuring. That is, the load the keyboard presents is negligible except when it's transmitting, when it is transmitting it pulls a sharp current pulse and then goes back to idling. Obviously it's unlikely that it is going to have the measurement sophistication to measure the battery during a pulse, measurement during idle is much more likely both from an instrumentation point of view and a coding point of view.
Just for completeness I also measured each cell with a 4k load (an educated guess at a mean loading in circuit) in parallel and got the same voltages, with the only difference being instead of a steady reading at the 10 uV level it was slowly drifting down, as you would expect.
Anyway, the Batterizer/Batteroo testing issue is a dead one but I remember promising an update when I needed to change batteries so that was it. It might be a useful data point for someone in the future.
One month later I can also chime in on the last fact: I have several Logitech devices which seem to run forever on standard cells. However, when low-voltage strikes, they start behaving erratically: the mouse loses clicks and keyboard fails to wake up on first keypress. The unloaded voltage is always around 1.2V, but, there is an LED on pairing and it tries to draw a large amount of current (1-2mA vs <10uA) on first user action. Also, the switches pull some current when actuated, not significant for us Arduino types, but every 10uA counts at that level. Just some food for thought.
I still think the current uC technology is amazing; "some" years ago I had a 1.3MP digital camera with a segmented <1" LCD that could only take 30-40 pics on 2xAAAs. It drew ~200mA while on and ~75mA while "off". It was probably the programmers' fault but nonetheless..