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Batteroo testing
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Delta:
Excellent work Frank.  Nice pretty graphs for the geeky engineers, and a nice simple video of trains and a timer for the "normal people".  Both result in the same conclusions: The claims of the BatterBros are nonsense.
TheAmmoniacal:
When doing tests on the Batteroo sleeve, make sure to keep an identical parallel. In order to measure the increased "performance" achieved using the Batteroo sleeve, you must compensate for the normal recovery of the cell.
quad:
I've been thinking about wireless keyboard testing. What is a good test protocol for this?

Would a Raspberry Pi with wireless keyboard work, as to not tie up someone's computer for a few weeks? Weigh down a key and use the scripts I'm working on the count the number of keystrokes. Display the time of the last keystroke pressed, so you can "set and forget"

What about having users install a keystroke counting software on their everyday computer... and log the time started, total number of keys, and total number of hours, and the time at the end of it. Usage patterns would be different - would this test be valid?

P.S Made some more progress on the Windows keyboard tester, mostly GUI stuff

Towger:
I am 99% sure you cannot just weigh down a key on a quality wireless keyboard. The processor should put it into sleep mode if it sees a stuck key.
A keyboard would often get stuff resting on it on a messy table.
FrankBuss:
I wonder why the train test Batteroo did, showed such different results, see here: https://www.facebook.com/revivebatteries/posts/1303252479741119 With the train model I used, the speed for both tests, with and without sleeve, was nearly identical. Too bad that Batteroo didn't publish the full movie or data so far.

So for better comparison, a reliable and honest person, with experience in programming, created a Python script (me  :) ), with OpenCV to extract the number of laps and lap time for each round, because this is a perfect example to evaluate OpenCV, something I wanted to do anyway. See here for the full script. It was much easier than expected, because of all the useful functions in OpenCV. And the script analyzes the video faster than realtime.

It works like this: There are two rectangular areas, one at the top of the track and one at the bottom. If the train gets inside the bottom rectangle, the lap detection gets armed. When armed and it gets inside the top rectangle, the lap timer is started and it is disarmed. When it is at top again (after armed at bottom), the lap time is printed, and the lap timer is started for the next lap. This is very reliable, even when the detection if a train is inside a rectangle is not reliable, e.g. if it oscillates at the borders, and can measure very slow trains as well, without the need for an arbitrary hold-off time.

The detection if the train is inside a rectangle is easy: I just count the number of dark and bright pixels and if there are more dark pixels than bright pixels, it is inside (because the track is much brighter than the train). To determine the threshold for dark pixels and test the train detection, the script can be started in interactive mode. If it is inside a rectangle, the rectangle is drawn in green:







For the threshold you can press the "h" key while the train is in one rectangle, and you'll get a histogram of both rectangles:



Just choose a value between the two peaks. This could be automated as well and more sophisticated functions of OpenCV could be used, like the train could be tracked on the whole track and it could be evaluated how smooth it moves (looks a bit more jerkily with the Batteroo sleeve), but this quick hack works really good to measure the basics.

With the startStop array at the beginning of the script, multiple test runs can be defined for one video.

I used the raw footage of the train video (glad I didn't delete it already) and created a full video of it, but compressed and scaled down a lot more, so that it doesn't need many GB, but it is the full 3:19 hour without timelapse. I've uploaded it here, 1.4 GB (no worries if you want to download it to play with OpenCV, my server has an unlimited bandwidth hosting plan, it just gets limited to 10 Mbit/s if the traffic gets too high). As in the Batteroo test, I created a spreadsheet with the following number: lap number, lap start time, lap end time, total lap time, feet per minute speed. Unlike Batteroo of course, I publish the spreadsheet, you can see it here. The lap counts are the same as @samgab reported (+/-1). Diagram:



If anyone wants to measure something as well, maybe a drop out art student, feel free to use the script. No need for any extra hardware for a lap counter.
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