Potential breakthrough battery life extender?

I read about that yesterday — looks intriguing, especially if it's as inexpensive & light as it sounds like it will be!

Don't modern and most good electronics build this into the device ?

Constant drain means much shorter battery life in low drain devices, not more battery life.

I suspect he extra drain will be very efficient at turning rechargeable cells into disposables.

I have nothing really to add, but this sounds pretty interesting.

Like many others, I shall keep my eyes on it.

Sounds super interesting. A lot of my devices, like the headlights on my bicycle, have a voltage regulator of some type. If the voltage drops below a certain threshold, the light shuts off (what genius thought up that stupid idea??). If I pop the battery into an unregulated headlamp, it works fine (albeit a bit dimly). This would be really cool to get more out of the batteries I’m already using.

HJ
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Actually Jim, I think this technology is exactly the same as what's in your headlamps, just miniaturized. Voltage regulators don't just shut off the light when a threshold is reached, as you say. They also keep the voltage going to the electronics constant even when the battery's voltage drops. That's why an unregulated light will steadily grow dimmer as the battery drains, but a regulated light will remain approximately the same brightness for most of its life and then drop off quickly when the battery falls below a threshold.

I'm not an engineer, but that's my understanding of the tech at least.

I don't see how it can help.

You might get a brighter unregulated lamp for a shorter time, but won't see an increased run time. The unregulated and progressively dimmer lamp is discharging the cells as much as possible. Well past the cells ability to produce a regulated 1.3v or higher.

This should make your unregulated lamp behave closer to the one with a similar device built in. Regulated voltage for a constant light output.

If a dimming lamp is a feature, this will probably be a huge disappointment.

I am an electrical engineer. This might extend battery life for some poorly designed things, but the claims are exaggerated and it won't work for everything.

For high drain devices, the batteries are dead when they can't provide enough current any more. This device can increase the voltage but not the current. A battery with this device might show a 1.5V open circuit voltage with a dead battery, but if you hook up a large load, like a powerful LED light, it won't be able to maintain regulation and the voltage will drop and it won't work.

In addition, a circuit that small can't handle a lot of current, so if you put it in a device with a high load, maybe 1A or more, it will shut down or overheat or burn up. Small electronics simply can't handle a lot of current because it takes relatively large wires. A power supply that increases the voltage requires inductors, as far as I know, and it's impossible to miniaturize an inductor that can handle high current beyond a certain point. It's limited by the resistance of the wire and the magnetic properties of the core.

They come to the 800% claim by assuming that the battery is dead at 1.4V, and every 0.1V is another unit of capacity. It doesn't work that way. It's not linear. And rechargeable batteries are nominally 1.2V anyway, so if a device works with rechargeables it will work with alkaline batteries below 1.2V. Alkaline batteries are usually considered dead below 0.8-1.1V, and there's really not much energy left in them after that.

Check out these battery discharge curves.
http://www.powerstream.com/AA-tests.htm
You can see that after voltage drops below around 1V there is simply no more capacity. These discharge curves are done at constant current, which is kind of like the load this device will put on a battery. In fact because of inefficiency and the way power conversion works, this device will actually draw increasing current as the voltage drops, so it's even worse than these tests.

The 4th curve is a good example of a situation where one might think this would help- a relatively low load. But as you can see, once the battery voltage drops below about 0.8V there's no more energy, and it's dead. If you had this device hooked up to a dead battery and you wanted 100mA at 1.5V it would need to draw at least 200mA at 0.75V, and a bit more because of inefficiency (it could be 80-90% efficient if it's really good). If you put a 200mA load on dead battery (measuring 0.75V), the voltage will quickly drop to 0 because the battery is dead.

I have a couple Princeton Tec headlamps that are regulated. They maintain full brightness until the batteries can no longer supply that much power. At that point, they warn me (by flashing) that the batteries are low, and they continue to make as much light as possible until the batteries are really dead. Maybe with some changes to the regulation circuit they could maintain full brightness a bit longer, but after that they would suddenly shut off completely once the battery is fully dead. I'd prefer to have some time of gradually decreasing light so I have time to change the batteries before the light cuts out. I use them for caving, and there are some times when you can't change the batteries, so it would be bad to have a light that suddenly shuts off.

In short, this thing is snake oil. When I read the part about the break-in at the beginning I had to check to make sure it wasn't published on April 1, it just sounds so contrived. Apparently there was a real break-in, but they could have staged it and called the police to report it. I hope the police find the people responsible because they are probably working for the inventor of this device.

The circuit is probably a Joule Thief.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Joule-Thief/
It works well for extremely low current loads, like a single LED way below full brightness.

There are things on the market that probably already use this technology. For example, Logitech makes wireless mice with over a year of battery life on a single AA and keyboards that will go 2-3 years on a single (or two, I can't remember) AA. I have yet to replace the battery in my wireless keyboard.

"Snake oil"

I agree.

–B.G.–

800% ????
Pure unadulterated snake oil.
OK, in deference to Bob, 'pure adulterated snake oil'…
They also sell bridges and perpetual motion machines.

Cheers

"Pure unadulterated snake oil."

I doubt that the snake oil is pure. The whole thing has a speck of truth to it, but the marketing hype is hilarious.

–B.G.–

>>The whole thing has a speck of truth to it, but the marketing hype is hilarious.

I particularly enjoyed the break-in story. Industrial espionage SO adds that last little bit that hauls me in hook, line and sinker. I'm going to pre-order a couple dozen. Anyone have a link to the kickstarter page?

From that PC World article I particularly liked this line :
"This is my collection of spent alkaline batteries. Maybe it’s a good thing I never recycled them—with Batteriser I may never need to buy another battery again (barring leaks, of course)."

( working in London I met an interesting character that used to hang around Mayfair, particularly Shepherd market ( I lived around the corner).
Many years later, here in Melbourne, I saw his photo on article about how he had "sold" a London Bridge to a couple of american tourists . true story.)