The Signal Path Blog I am afraid that it will not be enough. They already started going into the personal direction of "one dumb videoblogger that doesn't know shit". The only way to make the shut up is to have scientific facts at every corner (i.e. at every reputable videoblogger). Currently its two voices and people chose which to believe. But if its one insane voice against a wall of accurate reality, then its hard to make a wrong choice.
Dennis Lubert I am afraid that even that will not be enough, there always will be people that will believe to what they say (you see how many people believe in free energy, solar roadways, thorium powered car, over unity devices...). No matter how many scientific fact you present to some people (I will dare to say majority) will always believe more to good advertisement and to people who tell them them stories they want to hear. I understand that for people which are watching this channel and similar ones are perfectly clear that they started from false premise in their claims about product, but for most other people that is not fact (and that is people they will buy their product). I am only glad that someone made record of their mistakes (false claims) and it will be set in history that not all people in 21 century was blind to believe only to advertisement
The Signal Path Blog Not to distract from your original comment (I agree by the way), but I just caught these guys boosting their page with fake accounts. I just posted the info to this page 15 mins or so ago. Once again, sorry for using your comment to direct attention to my comment. I'm so far down the list and I want people to see what a bunch of scammers these guys are.
The Signal Path Blog The best he can do because he is dealing with dumbasses is making the real dumb test, buying a couple of them, showing the garbage this product is and GAME OVER. He walked on. No power supplies, no explanations, no funny videos responding with BS. check the real deal for once. Because its gonna to fail, THEY are gonna to fail and no other video response from them will pop up. Check the real deal, and kill them for once. AVG consumer doestn know about power supplies, ESR, loading curves, scopes etc. AVG consumer could be pranked by videos like Dave shown. So, got to the same level. Make a CONSUMER ORIENTED VIDEO. The real deal and real facts sooo dumb and soooo hobby and soooo ghetto that anybody can figure aout that this product is a cmplete SCAM
It's pretty obvious how bullshit this is. They tested the power supply under load and then compared it to batteries they tested open circuit. That isn't even a fair comparison. But for anyone who still isn't sure who to believe in this argument, consider the participants. On one side you have a qualified and experienced electrical engineer, who has made a career out of educating people on the net (among other things). On the other side, you have a company trying to sell you a product... Enough said.
Darren Jacobson If I was wrong I would have been hounded down in my original video by my engineering audience who are every Johnny on the spot to pick out faults in my videos (as engineers do, it's a good thing). I don't want people to take my word for it, investigate and confirm yourself, this is pretty easy stuff to debunk.
Darren Jacobson I submitted a report with indegogo (linked your first video in the claim, Dave, I hope you don't mind). I'm not hopeful it will change anything, but at least I can say I tried. It very obviously goes against their terms of service, " If the Campaign is claiming to do the impossible or it's just plain phony, don't post it."
Darren Jacobson you dont even need to be a electronics guy. I'm in computer sciences and do this as a hobby. My oscilloscope is better compensated that that one, and it was pretty obvious this was bs. seroiusly, ESR, the monkey died at 0.4V per cell, you have two batteries at 1.2V open circuit, with say a bunch of esr, you plug them in. Start the monkey, current with cause them to fall below 0.4V. Had they measured the voltage at the terminals it would have measured less than what they used in the power supply. It would have been suicide. But obviously they wuoldnt do it because this is all a scam. That soldering iron (a cheap one, not a hakko or goot one), all that mess of empty circuit boards and wires, that uncompensated oscilloscope hooked to its internal square wave.....not to mention in every example they appeal to emotions by showing it would be cool so that KIDS toys would last longer. (target market: women, old people, idiots that like buying niche gadgets) EEVblog idea for dave. you could do that now that i think about it. Do it with the power supply, then put some almost dead bateries with 1.2V "of energy", measure voltage at the terminals, show that its below that of the power supply. Put some fresh ones, let them drain, meassure voltage, they should die at the same voltage of the power supply. It shouldnt take too long to do with some toy. Simple and shows what they didnt, and proves you were right. There's nothing else left for them to use as an excuse. Anything else is an obvious lie for anyone, even non savvy people..
EEVblog There is also the misleading way they tested the product load. With the power supply they started the product and got it running and then lowered the voltage, then with the partially drained batteries they attempted to start the product cold from a dead stop. DC motors require more current to startup than when they are already running. So it is no surprise that even 0.9V would likely not allow the product to start. So they are comparing apples to oranges since with the power supply they did not start out at 0V and slowly up it until the product started. It will most certainly require more current to overcome the static friction of the product.
Mike Whitenton It might be this one www.especialneeds.com/switch-rewards-adapted-magic-monkey.html this one looks a bit different..not sure www.amazon.com/Westminster-Toys-Magic-Toy-Monkey/dp/B0000V4H4O/
The Batteriser Batteroo "fan page" channel just posted an announcement saying: "Pls stand by we are in a process of releasing a video with the technical explanation for all engineers on how Batteriser works, while at first glance, it seems implausible, I am sure that real genuine engineers will appreciate our whiteboard technical discussions along with simulation, data matching battery companies spec sheets, in conjunction with device data. Of course, those whose revenue will be reduced by our technology will do everything to divert attention"
+vwestlife They probably will release it. My bet is a combined PFM/charge-pump integrated DC-DC converter. Like those advanced Maxim micropower ones. They're probably using the sleeve as the capacitor to keep it extra small. Now, if they manage to explain how a DC-DC step-up (not even going into PFM vs charge-pump details) works to layman without making errors, color me surprised.
Dave, I think you should have pointed out that the monkey doesn't even *have* a cutoff voltage like a wireless keyboard or whatever. Judging by the fact that they took it down to .9V I'd say there's only a brushed DC motor in there. Not a single scrap of circuitry to detect voltage. Also interesting that all the devices they showed on their video were motor driven, and likely didn't have cutoff voltages either. I'd say that was clever, but I don't think they're smart enough to do clever. ESR and other factors aside, claiming a DC motor has a hard cutoff like a digital device is what got me. It's just so bafflingly stupid, and I really can't decide if they did it on purpose or not.
Brant Martin Yeah I should have mentioned that. But the whole point of the video was to show how you can detect cutoff voltage in a product with a PSU. The device is kinda irrelevant.
Brant Martin Note that @ 0.9V the motor is taking more than 800mA, so even when voltage is low, motor got enough current (lets say torque) to keep doing the job. Like Dave said, 1.2V of a dead battery is NOTHING, once you turn on the monkey ..... current would probably be around 200mA or less and voltage less than 0.9, so motor doesnt give a sh1t. They did it on purpose, because on a low power device like a thermometer or calculator, the would have failed this test This people never use a car ??????????. Car bsattery at 11.9V (WOW, I have my 12V) is useless and you cant even crank the car, but yes, you can turn on the radio =)
My head hurts from the "misleading" videos from Batteriser! But thank you Dave for explaining it to those who weren't sure about it. Batteriser monkey test is also not done correctly as they didn't have it in the same position (more or different force on a motor). Anyway, looking forward for battery tests and characteristics Dave is doing :)
***** you know someone is a con artist when he starts disabling comments and censoring stuff with generic excuses like that. Not that fan MAIL has anything to do with youtube comments......but then they can say "but some comments were NSFW and we want this to be family friendly", and by then you should know they are only using moral excuses to avoid answering to the critique. They are trying to censor anything that could make people see the scam.
Keylitho I supported their campaign just to get a set of them to make a video about to debunk their ridiculous claims. IIRC, the one I got comes with a huge lot of batteries so I'd totally be willing to mail Dave some if someone doesn't beat me to it. That's assuming they ever mail out their products....
I hope Dave gets enough of these to test a large battery pack made up of 6 or more cells in series. It would be interesting to see what happens when the cell with the lowest capacity is "finally depleted". What will it do if the other cells continue to force current through it? Will all current stop flowing? Will the depleted battery become damaged? Will it fail catastrophically? Will one or more of the Baterisers become damaged by the (relatively) high voltage that can be available? How would the Bateriser fail? Catastrophically? I love it when Dave tortures stuff :-)
This is how I feel at work sometimes. I've been trying to explain to the engineers for about a year now that if you have two robotic welders in a cell, then you need a flowmeter on the argon line for each robot. If they share a single flowmeter and they both weld simultaneously, each one gets about half the set flow. This is basic shit someone in middle school should be capable of understanding. I think they're finally realizing I might be onto something at least.
Even by the age of 5 I had learned at least this much about batteries and voltage. Can not say that I understood the reason, much less the theory, at that age, but even a child can observe the effect in practice with nothing more than some old batteries, a toy, and a cheap meter. You also quickly learn that batteries too weak for one toy will work just fine in a lower drain toy. Dave, do not let them get you too worked up. Some stupidity is beyond a cure, especially when money is involved. I did love that workbench though, I have known very few EEs or hobbyists with such neat workbenches loaded with nothing but shiny, never touched, new gear! I have to clear a space just to set a project down these days between my electronics and radio gear.
Love the video. You did a really good Job at explaining everything in detail. I recently gave the Batteriser some thought and realized something. The cut off circuitry measures Voltage but not Current. With the Batteriser there is no way the product you are using can detect if the battery is low because trough the Batteriser it will always recieve 1.5V. But as soon as the battery starts to drop current until it is not enough to power the product it will shut off without a warning. That would be critical for devices that require power to store data. *It is like gluing the needle of your fuel meter to full in a car and then wondering why the car stops all of a sudden although the meter shows full*
The virgin soldering iron reminds me in those creationist videos of old where people in pristine lab coats give presentations in a studio. That'll get you banned from the lunch counter than anything else, incidentally.
You should add the word "Batteriser" to the title Dave. This way this video pop's up when people are searching for it. Stil wondering if these Batteriser guy's also tested their monkey toy with the depleted batteries and their magic Batteriser.
In most electronic products, there are really 2 voltages for the lower limit on the battery. 1) There is the minimum voltage at which the product will switch on. This is often measured with the battery nearly unloaded. The DC-DC converter hasn't even started when this test is made. This is usually higher than #2. 2) There is also the minimum voltage at which the product will continue to function. This is usually a lower voltage than (1). A good rule is to make #2 0.95V*Cells for the highest minimum that the part tol will result in and make the difference between #1 and #2 about 0.01V more than the expected IR drop from battery resistance and and your current consumption.
Knuckles the Echidna i actually feel bad for that scope. Imagine you were born an oscilloscope only to be used as electronic "tech" decoration for advertisements sets.....that's a sad oscilloscope if you ask me.
Laharl Krichevskoy I agree, someone eager to learn electronics could have got years of great service out of that scope instead of it being some pointless prop!
Batteriser is clearly on a major defensive with this move. You proved their product is essentially a scam and did it via methods they can not silence. The only recourse for this sham company is to do a smear campaign. Batteriser is doing nothing more than preying on the less knowledgeable with their products and info campaign. This is why we need folks like you, Dave.
funny thing is when i viewed the video's in incognito mode, EEVBlog #751 is either next in the autoplay list or the first suggested. I think you're winning dave!
Prehistoricman good point, i did use the link in the description to open the incognito window. In google The Bubble™ is very persistent. However the way they deal with dissenting comments is extremely telling, every comment that supports their argument is instantly allowed.
EEVblog , Dave, can't we estimate the battery contact voltage if they had probed internally instead of no load voltage? We know the product stopped working at 0.9V so we can guestimate the contact voltage to be around 0.9V. The cells were measured at 2.5V no load. We should be able to calculate the ISR and see if it makes any sense. This would be additional confirmation that the no load voltage was misleading in the video.
No load voltages mean very little...let even a dead cell sit long enough and, if there is enough material left to sustain a reaction in excess of internal leakages, even a dead cell can measure near full voltage after awhile. By the time an alkaline is measuring in the vicinity of 1.25V under no load it is pretty well dead already. I would not be surprised if their loaded voltage dropped from 2.5V no-load to closer to 0.1V under load -- you can pretty much bet that they cherry picked some dead batteries just to confuse the average viewer who wants to believe the claims.
Mike Whitenton Correct, and that's why open circuit voltage is misleading. And as Ethan Poole said above, there is complex electrochemisty at play, so you don't know the true energy state of the battery form the open load voltage. Their entire video is a misdirection to muddle PSU-battery non equivalency to product cutoff voltage, which are two different things that need not be associated.
I just caught them making posts on their own page. Some yahoo named "Brad Jones" commented that this product was amazing, etc etc., and then claiming he was an engineering student and that he wanted an internship for this amazing product! Well, I told him to have the University give him his money back and then cited a few obvious glitches with the logic while and then tagged the Batteriser folks.... Instead of Batteriser Replying, Brad Jones Replied with Brad Jones +Alexander Hiller hey stupid. are you illiterate? we are business, econ, acct, and phycology majors here at the community fan page. We send your questions to the engineers on the Batteriser team. I already mentioned several times. Directly from the CEO to us here at the fan page "Pls stand by we are in a process of releasing a video with the technical explanation for all engineers on how Batteriser works, while at first glance, it seems implausible, I am sure that real genuine engineers will appreciate... Reply View all comments He obviously forgot to log back into Batteriser before replying to me. What a bunch of FAKES! I screenshotted everything as well if anyone wants the convo.
From Brad Jones Again; +Alexander Hiller Come see me in person, or shut the fuck up. I told you my name, school, and specific building at the school. You can catch me coming in or out of classes. I had a long phone conversation with the fan page community last night and I am proud to say I am friends with the group. I am an engineering student and Buruss building is where all math classes are. I am not a graduate yet, which is why I asked for an intern. And I already knew about the Batteriser team at my school and I wanted...
Dave losing it is why im here. he reminds me of a professor i had, dude was cuban, had an amazing mustache, and gave some of the most fantastic rants i´ve ever seen.
Relatively new follower here. (Engineer, but not EE.) As a photographer, I was looking at the Batteriser to use in remote speed lights, so I was very happy to see the product name in your video title. Watching you tear apart their propaganda was refreshing.
For high drain applications like flashes you will generally get better performance from rechargeable batteries (such as NiMH or lithium). They do not have quite the same voltage as alkalines and and a lower total capacity, but because they have much less internal resistance they can cycle a flash quickly and for longer (a greater number of cycles) than an alkaline can sustain (despite alkalines greater energy capacity). I always use NiMH in my flash units (photography is a hobby), or occasionally disposable lithium cells, and only use alkaline batteries in a pinch. Rechargeable lithium batteries will also work well if you can find a pack designed to work with your flash.
Cutoff voltage aside; if Batteriser truly wanted to prove their product works they should have removed those 2 batteries from the monkey, attached their product, put them back into the monkey, and turned it on. They claim their product would allow the monkey to magically work. But why didn't they do this? Because they know their product doesn't work!
There is no such company as Batterizer anymore. This is how Dave brings companies down just by standing behind a whiteboard for half an hour. :D Fantastic. There are many debunkers out there, but Dave has definitely got a talent. Nobody can withstand an argument with someone whos got an enthusiasm and passion about EE.
I had an old sealed lead acid battery, you could over discharge it with a lightbulb until the battery under load drop to 0.00V. Remove the load, let it sit for a day and come back, you mesure 12.7V on it! Fully charge the battery, let it sit for a few hours (so the surface charge dissipate) and... you still mesure 12.7V ! This is a bit of an extreme example, but it just show another reason on why you can not mesure it without a load... Just finger resistance caused it to drop (if discharged) by a .few volts... Yes, that battery got abused, way too much... Served me for many years!
I watched your post on paid dislikes before watching this. Kind of added to my viewing pleasure knowing someone was so pi.sed off at your comprehensive debunk at their expense that they actually paid a bunch of Vietnamese to thumb you down hahahaha!!!!
What's so stupid about it is that a like or dislike on a video counts as the same thing with regard to ratings, it counts as viewer interaction. All they did by paying for a bunch of dislikes is to increase the videos' visibility.
@@spudhead169 I think the idea was to make it so that people who are looking at investing indiegogo or whatever, and who are looking for information on the product before making the decision (and as far as I know, even until now most of their capital has come from investors, not any sales, though I may be mistaken on that) will see a video "debunking" have a large ratio of dislikes, hopefully probably discouraging them from taking to heart any of the (completely true and accurate) argumentsresented here. Essentially, they just want to put juuuuuust enough doubt in someones' head that Bateroo's own fuzzy feel good marketing will overshadw the fact that scientists have shown in excrutiating detail why such a thing isn't near as special as they'd like you to believe. Again, people want to assume the scenarios that make them feel the best about things in general, and a message of "we made this gizmo that no one else ever thought of which makes disposable batteries last 8x longer, and its gonna save the environment and hurt 'Big Battery' and you're guaranteed to go to Heaven if you give us money" will, to a non-skeptical mind, outweigh a message of "this sort of thing has been known about for a long time, this circuit has probably been theorized in textbooks for decades, if not a century, and while it may well ~work~, it won't be nearly as effective at doing what t's supposed to, and the reason it hasn't already been done isn't that no one wanted to help the environment before, or hurt big battery, but rather that due to real world engineering constraints, it's just too little benefit to be bothered". That's just my feeling, anyway. At the time, they were crowdfunding and getting investors like mad, and having videos freely available from reputable sources demonstrating fully why such a product will function, just not even remotely close to as well as these folk say, could seriously hamper efforts to sucker people in, so at least putting a reason on he videos page to be able to discount the claims made without having to think about it (ie. "oh, this video says it's debunking the batteriser, but it does have a ton of dislikes, so they must have been biased or just done improper arguments, so I don't have to watch it and can continue to feel warm and fuzzy about saving the planet by giving these people money").
"If you didn't know any better, then the video sounds ok" You said it Dave, and your spot on. They are just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of people in order to sell them a product that does not actually do what they claim. sadly, we know that many people will fall for all their bull****.
Dave, you need to put batteriser in the title so this (correct) information shows up for people researching their insane product. Otherwise they watch that hilarious video (the oscilloscope killed me), don't see this in the related tab, and go on thinking the video is correct. They can censor peoples comments on their videos but they can't censor what comes up in searches :)
This was both a fun and insightful video. Thank you. Now I understand precisely why you can reuse dead batteries from high load devices in low load devices. It is because the resistance is higher in the low load device, and therefore the voltage is higher.
GauravA42 You know something, I would probably make the same mistake this guy did, if I hadn't seen this video. But then, I'm not an EE professional. I'm not even a hobbiest by Dave's definition. I'm just a guy who thinks electronics is cool, and tries his damnedest to learn, but always seems to end up wrong.
The Screen capture image for this is hilarious! 2:50 ..stick the battery in of course ..go in there and -ughgh-shove some probes up there..." Thanks batterizer for inspiring such a great performance from an actual engineer.
Hi Dave , I think in you are right in case the tested device uses a dc type current ( with no ripple ) but if the device uses for example a dc type current with a short time sharp high current then in that short time high current, batteri's voltage drop more than a power supply with low internal resistant so it may reset some digital function so in this case batteries can fail sooner than a power supply. Thanks for your rich channel Arash from Iran.
Right on the money Dave. For the people that don't believe using a power supply to test things. Use a super capacitor charged at the battery voltage and then use your product, monitor the voltage in the same time and bingo you've find out the cuttoff voltage. Why use a supercap? Well, because it doesn't have nowhere near the capacity of a battery, there by it will discharge fast but slow enough for you to run your tests. Hope this make a bit of sense. Cheers :)
I saw a brief in EETimes today mentioning this device - my first thought was "this is a surefire way to make an alkaline battery leak" (though in retrospect perhaps not). I read the gripping tale of the office break-in, and almost immediately found your video. It's interesting (and more than a little disheartening) to see how many people are throwing money at this. Thanks for fighting the good fight and wielding science against marketing!
David Richmond They silly thing is they have a half decent product that would be useful in a lot of niche situations. No need for the BS marketing, it would still sell.
Okay, so a war has broken out and Dave is winning with facts, truth and physics. I only have a 2 year degree in electronics technology, but I have many years of experience, so here is my 2 cents: Dave is correct and factual. Also, for those watchers who actually have degrees in the electrical engineering disciplines, I call on you all to weigh in. Most of the commenters are giving conversational type comments, so give some professional comments such as: Name: XXXX Degree: E, EE, etc Experience in design or theory: XX years I, XXXX , after viewing all of the material, videos, websites, etc. agree with Dave. His information is correct and factual. (I can't see anyone with credentials saying otherwise.) Thanks DAve for all of your fine videos.
Great video Dave!!! Wish i could Thumbs up more than once. Was looking and it seems you got only 1 dislike so far and that had to be the folks at batterooo.
I was waiting for my coleague in his car one day and I saw a thing plugged in in his lighter and I couldn't help take it apart because it was easy enough. Inside there was a resistor with a led. When he got back in the car I asked him what it was and he said it's a product that increases the mileage :) With the batterizer if you're using them for a wireless keyboard they might be worth a few bucks but I wouldn't expect them to add more than a day (enough to go buy new batteries)
Dave, i was just wondering. How long did it take for you to get on this level of knowledge? It looks like that you cover a great field of electrical engineering, and on the other hand you look a like hero to me. I like when you're " fighting " for a truth, when someone is trying to sell a fog. Cheers.
Matija S As I said, I knew about IR before I hit double digits. This is pretty basic knowledge to anyone in the field. I don't know everything of course, far from it, no one does, the field of electronics is almost infinite. There are many areas of electronics I have zero experience in. But you learn some stuff after having done it for 35+ years. Even if you don't know these things off-hand, any engineer should be able to be inquisitive and resourceful enough to go through the motions of checking claims. Almost anyone with decent electronics knowledge could have debunked this.
Omg, their shiny and alpine snow white work station made me remember some instllers VHS demonstrations in white overalls, white gloves installing a chimney insert... WITHOUT DIRTYING themselves with soot. Great video EEV blog.
I'd like to see them using their batteriser and power the monkey with the "dead" batteries shown in the video. That's what their product is designed to do, isn't it?
IncreasingVoltage Yep! My guess is would die in the arse because there is no useful energy left in the battery. And their boost converter must draw even more current because of the low load voltage. It's a battery death spiral.
We had this issue with a medical monitor module which had a blood pressure pump. When the motor was engaged, the device would instantaneously draw more current, and the battery voltage would drop beyond acceptable. However after the device reset itself, the drop recovered very quickly. Thus the drop did not register on the multimeter, however was clearly visible on the oscilloscope. The device worked fine with the lab supply, since the supply had enough current to handle the load. I guess, in this case a more practically useful value is not be the actual 'cut-off voltage' where the device resets itself, but more of 'what is the minimum voltage the battery can reach under the lighter load, where turning the motor is still safe' ? if there is a low battery light indicator, usually it would be tuned to that voltage, then the whole point is moot - if you have a device like that - the 'cut-off voltage' is the one when it starts blinking. But supposedly, there is no such indicator, and the task is to put one, then certainly one wouldn't be powering it from a lab supply to find the reference cut-off point where turning the motor would be cause a reset.
George Yohng my little wrist cuff is HORRIBLE for doing that. And it does it in batteries that drop to 1.1 or 1.2 volts. That is the ONLY device that I could see a voltage booster working on... or, you know, I just use rechargable batteries instead.....
I think its enough about the batteriser. I don't know what they were thinking while preparing this response, guess they had to do something to try and keep the customer's reputation back. Anyway whatever they will do now there are more interesting and more complex topics I was always looking for here. This video is high-school level, let's go back to EE please ! :)
This just shows, how world of marketing works. Deliberately using false or misleading arguments to make the less informed customer to buy the $h1t they have to sell. That's sick! Thank you, Dave, for your efforts in this particular case.
I could give them the benefit of the doubt if they simply had confirmation bias, but this is outright deception. They have contrived their video to save their asses. Well, their asses just got handed to them. If they have a legitimate product they should be able to back it up 100%.
Mike Whitenton Yeah, I wondered if they were like audiophools and just believed in their product despite logic telling them it was BS or if they were actually scammers. After seeing that video I believe them to be firmly in the latter camp.
A multimeter has a high input resistance for checking offload batteries, some meters have a battery checker for measuring the true condition of the battery this gives a more accurate voltage reading.
Hilarious, that fake-set workstation. Wish my tools all looked that squeaky clean, -----------> OH YEA that's right I actually use them and ALSO dont leave tool clutter. LOL at least there vid will get some extra hits thanks to you...
sayresy Devino how in the hell do younot leave tool clutter?! lol i tidy my workshop probably 1ce per week and within 24hrs it looks like a bomb hit it :P
Put 200 mOhms after your power supply and now you have an accurate simulation (some voltage deviation with load). Of course, the results will be virtually the same once you set the voltage at the device.
Dave I get the feeling those Batteriser guys should have kept their mouths shut. They woke the sleeping giant...Bombed pearl harbor. They have started to dig such a big hole for themselves. You should keep an eye out in your garden as they may well be surfacing in Australia soon. That is lesson for assholes to learn. Damage limitation - but they #$#$%@ it up. They turned up the gas. This was super work Dave, and this IS important stuff, and they must see we have a REAL expert, a professional, experienced designer of many years who they thought could be brushed off.
The internal resistance of a battery is less than 1 ohm as it's the load resistance of the item to be powered that matters more. It's been a few years since my electronics courses, but I'm pretty sure that registers as "not important enough for the schematic diagram for almost every circuit ever designed." I should still have that part of my notes explaining why we don't bother listing internal resistances of batteries when designing a circuit somewhere. Also, power supplies can't necessarily supply huge amounts of current and maintain their voltage. Every power supply has *some* limit of the current it can put out, which in turn limits the overall power the supply can put out. This is 1rst week of the 1rst semester material.
They deleted my comment as well. I feel sorry for them. Their dream of success is failing in front of their eyes. They should admit that they are wrong and go on with their lives.
Reminds me of the frictionless bearings fiasco from a while ago. Measuring product performance without load is simply meaningless in any scenario - electrical or mechanical. AvE had a cool video about it.
Justin Shaw You need to follow the back story. The Batteriser guys have been making crazy claims re. their product. It's been going back and forth for a while.
EEVblog Dave, gotta love what EEAtlanta said in the comments of the PCWorld article "Dave Jones graduated from Dramatic Arts School. The inventors of Batteriser are professors of electrical engineering." I think that is quite a complement!
EEVblog Their next claim: The Batteriser is made with depleted unobtainium 665, so you won't be able to reproduce our performance in your lab. Are you going to make a video on that too?
something you could show in the next video: the difference between measuring 2 single batteries vs measuring them combined in series (both without load to make it comparable to their wrong test)
They HAVE to say bullshit like this ... imagine how much money was invested in this project, it would be fiscally wrong to scrap the whole project just because it does not work Its wrong and bullshit but something they need to do
Alyx BioHaz The thing is the product does work. They could have had a nice niche market for this thing if they just told the truth about it's real capabilities. People would have still bought it.
EEVblog yea, but then, they wouldn´t have that amount of money in return they imagine, hoped, hoping, want to have, ought to have..... As the whole thing is lounched to look like THEEE 21th century cutting edge discovery. And furthermore it´s advertised as that....So they are stuck AND now forced to do something, to have it that way - regadless of its usabilty.....
One thing that no one seems to have addressed is that as this thing is a SMPSU connected to the cell all the time then it's going to impose a drain of some kind on the cell when it's in standby with the switched load off.
Apparently the controversy is that the voltage of a battery drops under load, so it is incorrect to measure the cut-off voltage and assume that that's the open circuit voltage of the battery when it stops operating. This is only true in case of an appliance that draws so much current that the difference is appreciable. Normally it surely is not, so Dave's method works just fine.
But again, the open-circuit voltage of the battery is meaningless, and I don't think that's what they were insinuating anyway. As Dave said a billion times, it's the voltage under load that matters.
LMAO, such an amusing video especially the analysis of the "lab" at 21:00. Thanks Dave! When the monkey stalls, it draws 0.8 A to run the device at 0.9 V, for an apparent resistance of 1.1 ohm. Back of the envelope calculations reveal the battery voltage would have been around 0.87 V ~< 0.9 V ( 2.46 V x 0.6 Ohm / 1.7 Ohm ). It's pretty close if you consider ESR. However, I don't think they proved the PS test invalid, just as everyone would have guessed mostly because they didn't bother measuring the voltage at the terminals. However, another major flaw of their argument is that they did not prove you can startup the toy at 0.9 V.
Dave, you probably know this, but there are battery simulators out there, cost a pretty penny, basically a power supply with adjustable internal resistance. I have used one from keithley to verify different switching converters with data from a real battery. you could easily set up a normal power supply to do the same, running a remote program that adjusts output voltage based on current drawn. in the end, the only thing that matters is what the product sees at its input terminals under load.
Oh and lead acid car batteries can measure almost as good as gold 11+V without load and have nothing left to them. In this video they conveniently pre-drained a battery set just to the right level to make it seem like the 1.3V claimed makes a huge difference. All service centers and auto parts stores measure car batteries under load.
the first thing that went though my mind when you started this video was that it depends weather your testing the battery or the device. the device doesn't know what is supplying it power, it just wants a certain voltage to operate and any devise that can give the voltage it needs is capable of supplying the amps it needs! that test they did is wrong and I'm just a hobbyist.
Dave, I think you are doing the best thing you can do. Scientific response to unscientific claims.
The Signal Path Blog I am afraid that it will not be enough. They already started going into the personal direction of "one dumb videoblogger that doesn't know shit". The only way to make the shut up is to have scientific facts at every corner (i.e. at every reputable videoblogger). Currently its two voices and people chose which to believe. But if its one insane voice against a wall of accurate reality, then its hard to make a wrong choice.
Dennis Lubert I am afraid that even that will not be enough, there always will be people that will believe to what they say (you see how many people believe in free energy, solar roadways, thorium powered car, over unity devices...).
No matter how many scientific fact you present to some people (I will dare to say majority) will always believe more to good advertisement and to people who tell them them stories they want to hear.
I understand that for people which are watching this channel and similar ones are perfectly clear that they started from false premise in their claims about product, but for most other people that is not fact (and that is people they will buy their product).
I am only glad that someone made record of their mistakes (false claims) and it will be set in history that not all people in 21 century was blind to believe only to advertisement
The Signal Path Blog Not to distract from your original comment (I agree by the way), but I just caught these guys boosting their page with fake accounts. I just posted the info to this page 15 mins or so ago. Once again, sorry for using your comment to direct attention to my comment. I'm so far down the list and I want people to see what a bunch of scammers these guys are.
***** Thanks, it sounds A LOT like the conversation I had. I posted my capture as well.
The Signal Path Blog The best he can do because he is dealing with dumbasses is making the real dumb test, buying a couple of them, showing the garbage this product is and GAME OVER. He walked on. No power supplies, no explanations, no funny videos responding with BS. check the real deal for once. Because its gonna to fail, THEY are gonna to fail and no other video response from them will pop up. Check the real deal, and kill them for once. AVG consumer doestn know about power supplies, ESR, loading curves, scopes etc. AVG consumer could be pranked by videos like Dave shown. So, got to the same level. Make a CONSUMER ORIENTED VIDEO. The real deal and real facts sooo dumb and soooo hobby and soooo ghetto that anybody can figure aout that this product is a cmplete SCAM
I just went to Batteriser's TH-cam channel and saw related channels: EEVBlog and EEVBlog2. Epic.
Sorry Dave, I believe Batteriser because they use professional voice over artists and have uplifting music in the background. (j/k :))
It's pretty obvious how bullshit this is. They tested the power supply under load and then compared it to batteries they tested open circuit. That isn't even a fair comparison. But for anyone who still isn't sure who to believe in this argument, consider the participants. On one side you have a qualified and experienced electrical engineer, who has made a career out of educating people on the net (among other things). On the other side, you have a company trying to sell you a product... Enough said.
Darren Jacobson If I was wrong I would have been hounded down in my original video by my engineering audience who are every Johnny on the spot to pick out faults in my videos (as engineers do, it's a good thing).
I don't want people to take my word for it, investigate and confirm yourself, this is pretty easy stuff to debunk.
EEVblog
Yeah, it is easy to debunk, even before my electronics courses in school I understood the behaviour of batteries.
eletronic engeniring i think. big different between eletrical and eletronic engeniring
Darren Jacobson I submitted a report with indegogo (linked your first video in the claim, Dave, I hope you don't mind). I'm not hopeful it will change anything, but at least I can say I tried. It very obviously goes against their terms of service, " If the Campaign is claiming to do the impossible or it's just plain phony, don't post it."
Darren Jacobson you dont even need to be a electronics guy. I'm in computer sciences and do this as a hobby. My oscilloscope is better compensated that that one, and it was pretty obvious this was bs.
seroiusly, ESR, the monkey died at 0.4V per cell, you have two batteries at 1.2V open circuit, with say a bunch of esr, you plug them in. Start the monkey, current with cause them to fall below 0.4V. Had they measured the voltage at the terminals it would have measured less than what they used in the power supply. It would have been suicide. But obviously they wuoldnt do it because this is all a scam. That soldering iron (a cheap one, not a hakko or goot one), all that mess of empty circuit boards and wires, that uncompensated oscilloscope hooked to its internal square wave.....not to mention in every example they appeal to emotions by showing it would be cool so that KIDS toys would last longer. (target market: women, old people, idiots that like buying niche gadgets)
EEVblog idea for dave. you could do that now that i think about it. Do it with the power supply, then put some almost dead bateries with 1.2V "of energy", measure voltage at the terminals, show that its below that of the power supply. Put some fresh ones, let them drain, meassure voltage, they should die at the same voltage of the power supply. It shouldnt take too long to do with some toy. Simple and shows what they didnt, and proves you were right. There's nothing else left for them to use as an excuse. Anything else is an obvious lie for anyone, even non savvy people..
EEVblog There is also the misleading way they tested the product load. With the power supply they started the product and got it running and then lowered the voltage, then with the partially drained batteries they attempted to start the product cold from a dead stop. DC motors require more current to startup than when they are already running. So it is no surprise that even 0.9V would likely not allow the product to start. So they are comparing apples to oranges since with the power supply they did not start out at 0V and slowly up it until the product started. It will most certainly require more current to overcome the static friction of the product.
Mike Whitenton It might be this one www.especialneeds.com/switch-rewards-adapted-magic-monkey.html this one looks a bit different..not sure www.amazon.com/Westminster-Toys-Magic-Toy-Monkey/dp/B0000V4H4O/
Mike Whitenton Dave mentions the surge required to start the toy.
+William Hayden I must have missed that. I was pretty tired when I watched the video.
I was too busy laughing. With so many golden nuggets buried in that video I had to watch it twice.
The Batteriser Batteroo "fan page" channel just posted an announcement saying: "Pls stand by we are in a process of releasing a video with the technical explanation for all engineers on how Batteriser works, while at first glance, it seems implausible, I am sure that real genuine engineers will appreciate our whiteboard technical discussions along with simulation, data matching battery companies spec sheets, in conjunction with device data. Of course, those whose revenue will be reduced by our technology will do everything to divert attention"
vwestlife O_o Laughing so hard - I think I just popped a tube. Can't wait for this one. Get ready Dave EEVblog .
Battery manufacturers HATE him!
+vwestlife They probably will release it. My bet is a combined PFM/charge-pump integrated DC-DC converter. Like those advanced Maxim micropower ones. They're probably using the sleeve as the capacitor to keep it extra small.
Now, if they manage to explain how a DC-DC step-up (not even going into PFM vs charge-pump details) works to layman without making errors, color me surprised.
When a company is using dislikes bots and/or paying to dislike a video, you just _KNOW_ they're doing something right.
*_*Facepalm_*
Dave's exasperated noises are the best part of this video. 10/10
Christopher Johnson I tried not to hyperventilate
Dave, I think you should have pointed out that the monkey doesn't even *have* a cutoff voltage like a wireless keyboard or whatever. Judging by the fact that they took it down to .9V I'd say there's only a brushed DC motor in there. Not a single scrap of circuitry to detect voltage.
Also interesting that all the devices they showed on their video were motor driven, and likely didn't have cutoff voltages either. I'd say that was clever, but I don't think they're smart enough to do clever.
ESR and other factors aside, claiming a DC motor has a hard cutoff like a digital device is what got me. It's just so bafflingly stupid, and I really can't decide if they did it on purpose or not.
Brant Martin Yeah I should have mentioned that. But the whole point of the video was to show how you can detect cutoff voltage in a product with a PSU. The device is kinda irrelevant.
Brant Martin Even the orientation of the toy is different among the two tests. It might even continue working with batteries if it was upright.
Brant Martin I suspect it'll current limit at around 200mA [if that]
Brant Martin Note that @ 0.9V the motor is taking more than 800mA, so even when voltage is low, motor got enough current (lets say torque) to keep doing the job. Like Dave said, 1.2V of a dead battery is NOTHING, once you turn on the monkey ..... current would probably be around 200mA or less and voltage less than 0.9, so motor doesnt give a sh1t. They did it on purpose, because on a low power device like a thermometer or calculator, the would have failed this test This people never use a car ??????????. Car bsattery at 11.9V (WOW, I have my 12V) is useless and you cant even crank the car, but yes, you can turn on the radio =)
I just laughed at their square wave, I mean come on, if you're going to fake something don't leave dumb mistakes like those lol.
Gordon Freeman At least, they didn't create resonance cascade there.
pvc988 you sure about that? to me it looks like their brains got transported to Xen quite a few months ago...
+pvc988 I never thought I'd even see a resonance cascade, let alone create one!
My head hurts from the "misleading" videos from Batteriser!
But thank you Dave for explaining it to those who weren't sure about it.
Batteriser monkey test is also not done correctly as they didn't have it in the same position (more or different force on a motor).
Anyway, looking forward for battery tests and characteristics Dave is doing :)
ZiGa:S Thanks. I hope some people gain some knowledge out of it.
***** you know someone is a con artist when he starts disabling comments and censoring stuff with generic excuses like that.
Not that fan MAIL has anything to do with youtube comments......but then they can say "but some comments were NSFW and we want this to be family friendly", and by then you should know they are only using moral excuses to avoid answering to the critique. They are trying to censor anything that could make people see the scam.
*****
Hmm, fan mail!?
Truth really hurts, doesn't it, hahaha :)
Someone please send Dave some of these for him to test in person..
Keylitho I supported their campaign just to get a set of them to make a video about to debunk their ridiculous claims. IIRC, the one I got comes with a huge lot of batteries so I'd totally be willing to mail Dave some if someone doesn't beat me to it. That's assuming they ever mail out their products....
TechnologyCatalyst watch out, Batteriser read Dave's comment section, they may even cancel your order to avoid that
Keylitho there is no need, really
I hope Dave gets enough of these to test a large battery pack made up of 6 or more cells in series. It would be interesting to see what happens when the cell with the lowest capacity is "finally depleted". What will it do if the other cells continue to force current through it? Will all current stop flowing? Will the depleted battery become damaged? Will it fail catastrophically? Will one or more of the Baterisers become damaged by the (relatively) high voltage that can be available? How would the Bateriser fail? Catastrophically?
I love it when Dave tortures stuff :-)
This is how I feel at work sometimes. I've been trying to explain to the engineers for about a year now that if you have two robotic welders in a cell, then you need a flowmeter on the argon line for each robot. If they share a single flowmeter and they both weld simultaneously, each one gets about half the set flow.
This is basic shit someone in middle school should be capable of understanding. I think they're finally realizing I might be onto something at least.
I love how all the suggested auto-load videos at the end of their videos come up with your debunking videos Dave!
Lance Pickup Terrific!
Wow - I can't believe they posted that video that's just.. I mean I'm not an electronics person and even I know the test they did was stupid.
***** Yeah, it's a real hobby level mistake!
Even by the age of 5 I had learned at least this much about batteries and voltage. Can not say that I understood the reason, much less the theory, at that age, but even a child can observe the effect in practice with nothing more than some old batteries, a toy, and a cheap meter. You also quickly learn that batteries too weak for one toy will work just fine in a lower drain toy.
Dave, do not let them get you too worked up. Some stupidity is beyond a cure, especially when money is involved. I did love that workbench though, I have known very few EEs or hobbyists with such neat workbenches loaded with nothing but shiny, never touched, new gear! I have to clear a space just to set a project down these days between my electronics and radio gear.
Love the video. You did a really good Job at explaining everything in detail. I recently gave the Batteriser some thought and realized something. The cut off circuitry measures Voltage but not Current. With the Batteriser there is no way the product you are using can detect if the battery is low because trough the Batteriser it will always recieve 1.5V. But as soon as the battery starts to drop current until it is not enough to power the product it will shut off without a warning. That would be critical for devices that require power to store data. *It is like gluing the needle of your fuel meter to full in a car and then wondering why the car stops all of a sudden although the meter shows full*
The virgin soldering iron reminds me in those creationist videos of old where people in pristine lab coats give presentations in a studio.
That'll get you banned from the lunch counter than anything else, incidentally.
It was nice to wake up and drink coffee while watching you destroy that guy. This is going to be a good day.
You should add the word "Batteriser" to the title Dave. This way this video pop's up when people are searching for it.
Stil wondering if these Batteriser guy's also tested their monkey toy with the depleted batteries and their magic Batteriser.
Michel Satoer Done.
Michel Satoer Great idea... Love it... HaHa
In most electronic products, there are really 2 voltages for the lower limit on the battery.
1) There is the minimum voltage at which the product will switch on. This is often measured with the battery nearly unloaded. The DC-DC converter hasn't even started when this test is made. This is usually higher than #2.
2) There is also the minimum voltage at which the product will continue to function. This is usually a lower voltage than (1).
A good rule is to make #2 0.95V*Cells for the highest minimum that the part tol will result in and make the difference between #1 and #2 about 0.01V more than the expected IR drop from battery resistance and and your current consumption.
Would love to see the Batterizer folks invited to Dave's lab for an on-camera discussion...... :)
I just kept thinking...
IR = Current X Resistance = Voltage drop due to internal resistance
should have done...
Ri = internal resistance
Thurs is fantastic entertainment! I was laughing along with you! I especially like the oscilloscope part!
Knuckles the Echidna i actually feel bad for that scope. Imagine you were born an oscilloscope only to be used as electronic "tech" decoration for advertisements sets.....that's a sad oscilloscope if you ask me.
Laharl Krichevskoy That's why a number of oscilloscopes have taken a profound leap off the bench and onto the floor. Of their own volition, of course.
Laharl Krichevskoy I agree, someone eager to learn electronics could have got years of great service out of that scope instead of it being some pointless prop!
Laharl Krichevskoy You made me cry :'(
Pure. Gold.
Good work, Dave. I'd say "git em, mate!" but you already got em.
Batteriser is clearly on a major defensive with this move. You proved their product is essentially a scam and did it via methods they can not silence. The only recourse for this sham company is to do a smear campaign.
Batteriser is doing nothing more than preying on the less knowledgeable with their products and info campaign.
This is why we need folks like you, Dave.
This has been a great series, debunking bullshit products by simply explaining the science is wonderful to watch
The one single dislike is from Batteriser
funny thing is when i viewed the video's in incognito mode, EEVBlog #751 is either next in the autoplay list or the first suggested.
I think you're winning dave!
Erik Bruijn bit of sneaky eevblog? Can't have this shit on your history!
Prehistoricman good point, i did use the link in the description to open the incognito window.
In google The Bubble™ is very persistent.
However the way they deal with dissenting comments is extremely telling, every comment that supports their argument is instantly allowed.
Oh I see, you're watching batteriser vids incognito. I do the same, except it's InPrivate for IE.
EEVblog , Dave, can't we estimate the battery contact voltage if they had probed internally instead of no load voltage? We know the product stopped working at 0.9V so we can guestimate the contact voltage to be around 0.9V. The cells were measured at 2.5V no load. We should be able to calculate the ISR and see if it makes any sense. This would be additional confirmation that the no load voltage was misleading in the video.
Mike Whitenton You could try that, but measuring the no load voltage is *always* misleading.
+EEVblog it's makes for good entertainment Dave, thanks for the laugh.
No load voltages mean very little...let even a dead cell sit long enough and, if there is enough material left to sustain a reaction in excess of internal leakages, even a dead cell can measure near full voltage after awhile. By the time an alkaline is measuring in the vicinity of 1.25V under no load it is pretty well dead already. I would not be surprised if their loaded voltage dropped from 2.5V no-load to closer to 0.1V under load -- you can pretty much bet that they cherry picked some dead batteries just to confuse the average viewer who wants to believe the claims.
EEVblog I get that. When they measured the no load battery the current through the battery was virtually 0A. So 0A across the ISR would be 0V.
Mike Whitenton Correct, and that's why open circuit voltage is misleading. And as Ethan Poole said above, there is complex electrochemisty at play, so you don't know the true energy state of the battery form the open load voltage. Their entire video is a misdirection to muddle PSU-battery non equivalency to product cutoff voltage, which are two different things that need not be associated.
I just caught them making posts on their own page. Some yahoo named "Brad Jones" commented that this product was amazing, etc etc., and then claiming he was an engineering student and that he wanted an internship for this amazing product! Well, I told him to have the University give him his money back and then cited a few obvious glitches with the logic while and then tagged the Batteriser folks.... Instead of Batteriser Replying, Brad Jones Replied with
Brad Jones
+Alexander Hiller hey stupid. are you illiterate? we are business, econ, acct, and phycology majors here at the community fan page. We send your questions to the engineers on the Batteriser team. I already mentioned several times.
Directly from the CEO to us here at the fan page "Pls stand by we are in a process of releasing a video with the technical explanation for all engineers on how Batteriser works, while at first glance, it seems implausible, I am sure that real genuine engineers will appreciate...
Reply
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He obviously forgot to log back into Batteriser before replying to me. What a bunch of FAKES! I screenshotted everything as well if anyone wants the convo.
From Brad Jones Again;
+Alexander Hiller Come see me in person, or shut the fuck up. I told you my name, school, and specific building at the school. You can catch me coming in or out of classes. I had a long phone conversation with the fan page community last night and I am proud to say I am friends with the group. I am an engineering student and Buruss building is where all math classes are. I am not a graduate yet, which is why I asked for an intern. And I already knew about the Batteriser team at my school and I wanted...
Also his TH-cam account is ONE day old and he is subscribed only to Batteriser.
Dave losing it is why im here. he reminds me of a professor i had, dude was cuban, had an amazing mustache, and gave some of the most fantastic rants i´ve ever seen.
My dad taught me that what the Batterizer guys are doing is the wrong way to measure batteries when I was 11.
Output Coupler And if you don't get taught it, you figure it out eventually just dabbling with electronics.
i've had a bad feeling about this batteriser crap all the way from start. Really cool what Dave explained this in such details.
I only clicked here because I thought that was a drawing of Tony Abbott with haemorrhoids.
Relatively new follower here. (Engineer, but not EE.) As a photographer, I was looking at the Batteriser to use in remote speed lights, so I was very happy to see the product name in your video title. Watching you tear apart their propaganda was refreshing.
For high drain applications like flashes you will generally get better performance from rechargeable batteries (such as NiMH or lithium). They do not have quite the same voltage as alkalines and and a lower total capacity, but because they have much less internal resistance they can cycle a flash quickly and for longer (a greater number of cycles) than an alkaline can sustain (despite alkalines greater energy capacity). I always use NiMH in my flash units (photography is a hobby), or occasionally disposable lithium cells, and only use alkaline batteries in a pinch. Rechargeable lithium batteries will also work well if you can find a pack designed to work with your flash.
Cutoff voltage aside; if Batteriser truly wanted to prove their product works they should have removed those 2 batteries from the monkey, attached their product, put them back into the monkey, and turned it on. They claim their product would allow the monkey to magically work. But why didn't they do this? Because they know their product doesn't work!
There is no such company as Batterizer anymore. This is how Dave brings companies down just by standing behind a whiteboard for half an hour. :D Fantastic. There are many debunkers out there, but Dave has definitely got a talent. Nobody can withstand an argument with someone whos got an enthusiasm and passion about EE.
1164 dislikes?
Why?
He's completely right!
+e1woqf Batteroo paid a load of Vietnamese youtubers to downvote his videos. Check out his other videos on it.
I had an old sealed lead acid battery, you could over discharge it with a lightbulb until the battery under load drop to 0.00V. Remove the load, let it sit for a day and come back, you mesure 12.7V on it! Fully charge the battery, let it sit for a few hours (so the surface charge dissipate) and... you still mesure 12.7V ! This is a bit of an extreme example, but it just show another reason on why you can not mesure it without a load... Just finger resistance caused it to drop (if discharged) by a .few volts...
Yes, that battery got abused, way too much... Served me for many years!
I watched your post on paid dislikes before watching this.
Kind of added to my viewing pleasure knowing someone was so pi.sed off at your comprehensive debunk at their expense that they actually paid a bunch of Vietnamese to thumb you down hahahaha!!!!
+Robert Horwat Pretty pathetic huh?
+EEVblog nothing says trustworthy more than paying people to dislike an amateur youtuber.
What's so stupid about it is that a like or dislike on a video counts as the same thing with regard to ratings, it counts as viewer interaction. All they did by paying for a bunch of dislikes is to increase the videos' visibility.
@@spudhead169 I think the idea was to make it so that people who are looking at investing indiegogo or whatever, and who are looking for information on the product before making the decision (and as far as I know, even until now most of their capital has come from investors, not any sales, though I may be mistaken on that) will see a video "debunking" have a large ratio of dislikes, hopefully probably discouraging them from taking to heart any of the (completely true and accurate) argumentsresented here.
Essentially, they just want to put juuuuuust enough doubt in someones' head that Bateroo's own fuzzy feel good marketing will overshadw the fact that scientists have shown in excrutiating detail why such a thing isn't near as special as they'd like you to believe. Again, people want to assume the scenarios that make them feel the best about things in general, and a message of "we made this gizmo that no one else ever thought of which makes disposable batteries last 8x longer, and its gonna save the environment and hurt 'Big Battery' and you're guaranteed to go to Heaven if you give us money" will, to a non-skeptical mind, outweigh a message of "this sort of thing has been known about for a long time, this circuit has probably been theorized in textbooks for decades, if not a century, and while it may well ~work~, it won't be nearly as effective at doing what t's supposed to, and the reason it hasn't already been done isn't that no one wanted to help the environment before, or hurt big battery, but rather that due to real world engineering constraints, it's just too little benefit to be bothered".
That's just my feeling, anyway. At the time, they were crowdfunding and getting investors like mad, and having videos freely available from reputable sources demonstrating fully why such a product will function, just not even remotely close to as well as these folk say, could seriously hamper efforts to sucker people in, so at least putting a reason on he videos page to be able to discount the claims made without having to think about it (ie. "oh, this video says it's debunking the batteriser, but it does have a ton of dislikes, so they must have been biased or just done improper arguments, so I don't have to watch it and can continue to feel warm and fuzzy about saving the planet by giving these people money").
"If you didn't know any better, then the video sounds ok" You said it Dave, and your spot on. They are just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of people in order to sell them a product that does not actually do what they claim. sadly, we know that many people will fall for all their bull****.
Dave, you need to put batteriser in the title so this (correct) information shows up for people researching their insane product. Otherwise they watch that hilarious video (the oscilloscope killed me), don't see this in the related tab, and go on thinking the video is correct. They can censor peoples comments on their videos but they can't censor what comes up in searches :)
Jon Sands Yep, good point, done.
Jon Sands Hell yeah! That scope almost killed me!!!
EEVblog the best educator on youtube has responded to my comment, I can die happy now
This was both a fun and insightful video. Thank you. Now I understand precisely why you can reuse dead batteries from high load devices in low load devices. It is because the resistance is higher in the low load device, and therefore the voltage is higher.
Haha, you destroyed this guy. There is no way he is an EE, that makes no sense, this is 1st year undergrad stuff.
Dave rips him another battery holder. :-p
gorillaau There would fit a D cell battery pack ;)
+gorillaau Hahahaha! Hey, it that the batteriser guys head sticking out of the new hole? 😁😁😁
GauravA42 You know something, I would probably make the same mistake this guy did, if I hadn't seen this video. But then, I'm not an EE professional. I'm not even a hobbiest by Dave's definition. I'm just a guy who thinks electronics is cool, and tries his damnedest to learn, but always seems to end up wrong.
The Screen capture image for this is hilarious! 2:50 ..stick the battery in of course ..go in there and -ughgh-shove some probes up there..." Thanks batterizer for inspiring such a great performance from an actual engineer.
Just perfect Dave, do tell'em!
Hi Dave ,
I think in you are right in case the tested device uses a dc type current ( with no ripple ) but if the device uses for example a dc type current with a short time sharp high current then in that short time high current, batteri's voltage drop more than a power supply with low internal resistant so it may reset some digital function so in this case batteries can fail sooner than a power supply.
Thanks for your rich channel
Arash from Iran.
poor monkey, has wires up its butt :(, thanks for the laugh dave and the insight into batteries :P
Right on the money Dave. For the people that don't believe using a power supply to test things. Use a super capacitor charged at the battery voltage and then use your product, monitor the voltage in the same time and bingo you've find out the cuttoff voltage. Why use a supercap? Well, because it doesn't have nowhere near the capacity of a battery, there by it will discharge fast but slow enough for you to run your tests. Hope this make a bit of sense. Cheers :)
I think he found his profesor title in cornflakes :)
Boy where do theses people come from? This was first year when learning electronics, well put Dave.
5 guys that work at batteriser disliked this video...
I saw a brief in EETimes today mentioning this device - my first thought was "this is a surefire way to make an alkaline battery leak" (though in retrospect perhaps not). I read the gripping tale of the office break-in, and almost immediately found your video. It's interesting (and more than a little disheartening) to see how many people are throwing money at this. Thanks for fighting the good fight and wielding science against marketing!
Flashy graphics and flawed arguments, sounds like they're learning from the audiophools
David Richmond They silly thing is they have a half decent product that would be useful in a lot of niche situations. No need for the BS marketing, it would still sell.
EEVblog Hey, they can put that in the marketing blurb: Endorsed by Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame! ("It's half decent! Beauty!")
Okay, so a war has broken out and Dave is winning with facts, truth and physics. I only have a 2 year degree in electronics technology, but I have many years of experience, so here is my 2 cents: Dave is correct and factual.
Also, for those watchers who actually have degrees in the electrical engineering disciplines, I call on you all to weigh in. Most of the commenters are giving conversational type comments, so give some professional comments such as:
Name: XXXX
Degree: E, EE, etc
Experience in design or theory: XX years
I, XXXX , after viewing all of the material, videos, websites, etc. agree with Dave. His information is correct and factual. (I can't see anyone with credentials saying otherwise.)
Thanks DAve for all of your fine videos.
Great video Dave!!! Wish i could Thumbs up more than once. Was looking and it seems you got only 1 dislike so far and that had to be the folks at batterooo.
Anthony Cress Thanks. Thumbs up for that beard!
I was waiting for my coleague in his car one day and I saw a thing plugged in in his lighter and I couldn't help take it apart because it was easy enough. Inside there was a resistor with a led. When he got back in the car I asked him what it was and he said it's a product that increases the mileage :) With the batterizer if you're using them for a wireless keyboard they might be worth a few bucks but I wouldn't expect them to add more than a day (enough to go buy new batteries)
Dave, i was just wondering. How long did it take for you to get on this level of knowledge? It looks like that you cover a great field of electrical engineering, and on the other hand you look a like hero to me.
I like when you're " fighting " for a truth, when someone is trying to sell a fog.
Cheers.
Matija S As I said, I knew about IR before I hit double digits. This is pretty basic knowledge to anyone in the field. I don't know everything of course, far from it, no one does, the field of electronics is almost infinite. There are many areas of electronics I have zero experience in. But you learn some stuff after having done it for 35+ years. Even if you don't know these things off-hand, any engineer should be able to be inquisitive and resourceful enough to go through the motions of checking claims. Almost anyone with decent electronics knowledge could have debunked this.
Omg, their shiny and alpine snow white work station made me remember some instllers VHS demonstrations in white overalls, white gloves installing a chimney insert... WITHOUT DIRTYING themselves with soot. Great video EEV blog.
I'd like to see them using their batteriser and power the monkey with the "dead" batteries shown in the video. That's what their product is designed to do, isn't it?
IncreasingVoltage Yep! My guess is would die in the arse because there is no useful energy left in the battery. And their boost converter must draw even more current because of the low load voltage. It's a battery death spiral.
EEVblog It's really funny how a product, which claims to increase battery lifetime, actually does the opposite.
We had this issue with a medical monitor module which had a blood pressure pump. When the motor was engaged, the device would instantaneously draw more current, and the battery voltage would drop beyond acceptable. However after the device reset itself, the drop recovered very quickly. Thus the drop did not register on the multimeter, however was clearly visible on the oscilloscope. The device worked fine with the lab supply, since the supply had enough current to handle the load.
I guess, in this case a more practically useful value is not be the actual 'cut-off voltage' where the device resets itself, but more of 'what is the minimum voltage the battery can reach under the lighter load, where turning the motor is still safe' ? if there is a low battery light indicator, usually it would be tuned to that voltage, then the whole point is moot - if you have a device like that - the 'cut-off voltage' is the one when it starts blinking. But supposedly, there is no such indicator, and the task is to put one, then certainly one wouldn't be powering it from a lab supply to find the reference cut-off point where turning the motor would be cause a reset.
George Yohng my little wrist cuff is HORRIBLE for doing that. And it does it in batteries that drop to 1.1 or 1.2 volts. That is the ONLY device that I could see a voltage booster working on... or, you know, I just use rechargable batteries instead.....
They deleted my comment too D:
I think its enough about the batteriser. I don't know what they were thinking while preparing this response, guess they had to do something to try and keep the customer's reputation back. Anyway whatever they will do now there are more interesting and more complex topics I was always looking for here. This video is high-school level, let's go back to EE please ! :)
Batterizer must really hate these videos..... 3k likes to 1k dislikes! someone has been busy buying dislikes lol.
This just shows, how world of marketing works. Deliberately using false or misleading arguments to make the less informed customer to buy the $h1t they have to sell. That's sick! Thank you, Dave, for your efforts in this particular case.
I could give them the benefit of the doubt if they simply had confirmation bias, but this is outright deception. They have contrived their video to save their asses. Well, their asses just got handed to them.
If they have a legitimate product they should be able to back it up 100%.
Mike Whitenton Yeah, I wondered if they were like audiophools and just believed in their product despite logic telling them it was BS or if they were actually scammers. After seeing that video I believe them to be firmly in the latter camp.
A multimeter has a high input resistance for checking offload batteries, some meters have a battery checker for measuring the true condition of the battery this gives a more accurate voltage reading.
Insane how stupid people can be. I thought everybody knew the basics...
Gordon Freeman Oh, hi there brother.
Gordon Freeman Greetings fellow nerd :-)
Gordon Freeman But who is the real Gordon and who is the evil clone?!
foxman105 No one knows, the clone is so good even he doesn't know he's a clone :-)
Gordon Freeman the moment when you find someone else with you very same name and avatar on youtube......
Hilarious, that fake-set workstation. Wish my tools all looked that squeaky clean,
----------->
OH YEA that's right I actually use them and ALSO dont leave tool clutter. LOL at least there vid will get some extra hits thanks to you...
sayresy Devino LOL! Exactly! they are super scammers!
sayresy Devino they are a successful company... they've just expanded and bought some new equipment ;)
code123ns No doubt - but that workstation was BOGUS.
.A very funny vid from EEVblog tho..
sayresy Devino how in the hell do younot leave tool clutter?! lol i tidy my workshop probably 1ce per week and within 24hrs it looks like a bomb hit it :P
sn0wchyld Lol I share a workshop with a scotsman that gets mighty angry when tools are left lying around..
Oh my god that scope! DOUBLE FACEPALM..!!
Put 200 mOhms after your power supply and now you have an accurate simulation (some voltage deviation with load). Of course, the results will be virtually the same once you set the voltage at the device.
Dave I get the feeling those Batteriser guys should have kept their mouths shut. They woke the sleeping giant...Bombed pearl harbor. They have started to dig such a big hole for themselves. You should keep an eye out in your garden as they may well be surfacing in Australia soon.
That is lesson for assholes to learn. Damage limitation - but they #$#$%@ it up. They turned up the gas.
This was super work Dave, and this IS important stuff, and they must see we have a REAL expert, a professional, experienced designer of many years who they thought could be brushed off.
mart fart I think they've dispatched "Nature Man"! Watch out Dave he's coming. Crikey mate! Yeah sorry, blame Nature Man.
William Hayden I heard Dave is so strong he can defend himself with nothing but his letter opener.
I just searched for the word batteriser and the top result is your video :) . No wonder they panicking right now... :D
* grabbing popcorn *
The internal resistance of a battery is less than 1 ohm as it's the load resistance of the item to be powered that matters more. It's been a few years since my electronics courses, but I'm pretty sure that registers as "not important enough for the schematic diagram for almost every circuit ever designed." I should still have that part of my notes explaining why we don't bother listing internal resistances of batteries when designing a circuit somewhere.
Also, power supplies can't necessarily supply huge amounts of current and maintain their voltage. Every power supply has *some* limit of the current it can put out, which in turn limits the overall power the supply can put out. This is 1rst week of the 1rst semester material.
They deleted my comment as well. I feel sorry for them. Their dream of success is failing in front of their eyes. They should admit that they are wrong and go on with their lives.
Peo Håkansson A few people have said their comments were deleted too. Guess they can't handle technical questions.
Thanks, Dave, for the video series. This (batteries and power electronics) is one of my many favorite subjects.
Snake oil salesmen get mad when you doubt them :D
Great video. Waited three days to watch it after it was uploaded and I've learnt a'lot so thumbs up and it was really worth watching!
Batterizer clutching at straws...
s3tTz Clutching at a straw man!
Reminds me of the frictionless bearings fiasco from a while ago. Measuring product performance without load is simply meaningless in any scenario - electrical or mechanical. AvE had a cool video about it.
I haven't laughed more in a long time! What a bunch of dolts.
A bit lengthy, but man he is good. I laughed a bit too...thx for sharing Anool!
I see his point. An academic made a blunder... I'm not as surprised as he is.
Justin Shaw You need to follow the back story. The Batteriser guys have been making crazy claims re. their product. It's been going back and forth for a while.
Ok, now I get it. He is rebutting the dolt's rebuttal. Hence the animation.
EEVblog Dave, gotta love what EEAtlanta said in the comments of the PCWorld article "Dave Jones graduated from Dramatic Arts School. The inventors of Batteriser are professors of electrical engineering." I think that is quite a complement!
barcelona08018 I'm flattered!
This proves that snake oil salesmen would go to almost any length to sell their tricks.
These videos are fine by me. I really enjoy the BS/baloney type series.
Keep them coming please.
Dave, please stop feeding the trolls...
Eyal Teerosh I couldn't help myself, I feel dirty now.
EEVblog Your Whiteboard DaveCad is the first I really like.
EEVblog I exactly know how are you feeling
EEVblog Their next claim: The Batteriser is made with depleted unobtainium 665, so you won't be able to reproduce our performance in your lab. Are you going to make a video on that too?
something you could show in the next video: the difference between measuring 2 single batteries vs measuring them combined in series (both without load to make it comparable to their wrong test)
They HAVE to say bullshit like this ... imagine how much money was invested in this project, it would be fiscally wrong to scrap the whole project just because it does not work
Its wrong and bullshit but something they need to do
Alyx BioHaz The thing is the product does work. They could have had a nice niche market for this thing if they just told the truth about it's real capabilities. People would have still bought it.
EEVblog yea, but then, they wouldn´t have that amount of money in return they imagine, hoped, hoping, want to have, ought to have.....
As the whole thing is lounched to look like THEEE 21th century cutting edge discovery. And furthermore it´s advertised as that....So they are stuck AND now forced to do something, to have it that way - regadless of its usabilty.....
The most telling part is that at the end of the video they didn't attach Batterisers to the half dead batteries and prove that it works :)
Surprised?
In the 21st century, around 80% of the world's population still belive in God!
This video made my night, think I was about 10 when I learned you should measure batteries under load.
One thing that no one seems to have addressed is that as this thing is a SMPSU connected to the cell all the time then it's going to impose a drain of some kind on the cell when it's in standby with the switched load off.
Apparently the controversy is that the voltage of a battery drops under load, so it is incorrect to measure the cut-off voltage and assume that that's the open circuit voltage of the battery when it stops operating. This is only true in case of an appliance that draws so much current that the difference is appreciable. Normally it surely is not, so Dave's method works just fine.
But again, the open-circuit voltage of the battery is meaningless, and I don't think that's what they were insinuating anyway. As Dave said a billion times, it's the voltage under load that matters.
LMAO, such an amusing video especially the analysis of the "lab" at 21:00. Thanks Dave!
When the monkey stalls, it draws 0.8 A to run the device at 0.9 V, for an apparent resistance of 1.1 ohm. Back of the envelope calculations reveal the battery voltage would have been around 0.87 V ~< 0.9 V ( 2.46 V x 0.6 Ohm / 1.7 Ohm ). It's pretty close if you consider ESR. However, I don't think they proved the PS test invalid, just as everyone would have guessed mostly because they didn't bother measuring the voltage at the terminals. However, another major flaw of their argument is that they did not prove you can startup the toy at 0.9 V.
Dave, you probably know this, but there are battery simulators out there, cost a pretty penny, basically a power supply with adjustable internal resistance. I have used one from keithley to verify different switching converters with data from a real battery. you could easily set up a normal power supply to do the same, running a remote program that adjusts output voltage based on current drawn. in the end, the only thing that matters is what the product sees at its input terminals under load.
Haralampi Nedelin
Even simpler: put a resistor in series with the power leads.
EEVblog 's debunk video is right in the suggested videos list of their debunk video at 19:02 :D
Oh and lead acid car batteries can measure almost as good as gold 11+V without load and have nothing left to them. In this video they conveniently pre-drained a battery set just to the right level to make it seem like the 1.3V claimed makes a huge difference. All service centers and auto parts stores measure car batteries under load.
great video Dave, funny and 100% correct. Tumbs up! Can't understand these tumbs down
That DaveCAD drawing is a masterpiece.
the first thing that went though my mind when you started this video was that it depends weather your testing the battery or the device. the device doesn't know what is supplying it power, it just wants a certain voltage to operate and any devise that can give the voltage it needs is capable of supplying the amps it needs! that test they did is wrong and I'm just a hobbyist.