Red flag: Phillips writes that the creator proved he wasn’t selling snake oil by demonstrating the gadget for him, but there’s no description of independent testing. Did the guy just play with it in front of you? Who provided the batteries? What were the test controls? Boosting voltage at the expense of amperage and getting 800% more operational time, really? Turned down VC because the “money trail” led to battery companies, in favor of Indiegogo? [link to reportage of indiegogo gadget scams] Consumers with mountains of nearly-dead alkaline batteries want to know!
I’m quite happy with this, as far as it goes.
Also, the first sentence of the post (“It betteridge!”) means NO.
Not all skepticism has to be posed in the ‘humorless, sighing curmudgeon’ voice, a performance with a very saturated market, and one that isn’t anywhere near as convincing as geeks like us think that it is.
Besides, policing skepticism so that it meets a requisite level of explicit denunciation is why we have Hacker News and I wouldn’t want to tread on their turf.
A lot of comments have indeed been leaning toward the “this is incorrect, I am appalled, let me explain at length the error of your ways” end of the spectrum lately. Serious business.
There’s a certain beauty in having a post whose first sentence is an invocation of Betteridge, yet is guaranteed to generate invocations of Betteridge from grumpy cats who complain about headlines but never read posts.
I recognize that I have a gift and I usually put it to virtuous use.
Ah, I did not catch the betteridge reference. Perhaps I need to read up on the latest trends in internet memes. Or maybe I’m just old. In any case, I was definitely wrong about your level of skepticism in the lede, so I apologize for that!
It’s still true that links to snake oil like this aren’t really what I love about boingboing, even if they’re intended to debunk internet nonsense.
While thinking about this “800% longer” claim, I decided to take a look at AA cell discharge curves. They are very load-dependent, but show a distinct cliff at a voltage that’s fairly constant for a given load. It’s about 1V for 100 mA, dropping to 0.7V for 1A load.
What this means is that any device that will allow the Batteriser to improve its run time by 800% was designed by a clueless engineer.
A better idea to make your device run 800% longer is to buy a device designed by an engineer with a clue.
I remember about 25 years ago when someone claimed that coloring the inner plastic ring of a CD with a highlighter pen would improve the sound quality. Someone did this one better and started selling a special audiophile highlighter.
Considering alkaline (and rechargeable) batteries stay at pretty much full voltage (for a given load) for nearly all of their capacity…LOL. Even if it works as a “joule thief” (possible), that’s not going to power any high-draw device for long at all; amperage matters.
Sadly, people in general - although, thankfully, not BoingBoing members, apparently - are almost universally completely ignorant of physics =/ .
Here’s the real catch on the claims of battery-life extension (aside from the assumption of low current drain) from the patent application:
Some electronic equipments that use disposable batteries, such as AA batteries, are designed to stop operating when the battery voltage drops by 10% or so. That means when the voltage of an AA battery drops to about 1.4V or 1.35V, the battery is no longer useable by the equipment and has to be replaced with a fresh battery.
Key word there being “Some electronic equipments”.
Not “all”; not “most”; not even “many”.
If equipment won’t work at 1.4v or 1.35v, then it won’t work at all with NiMH rechargeables, which start out at 1.2v nominal - maybe 1.35v fully charged.
I have a lot of AA-powered equipment, and pretty much everything works just fine with NiMH rechargeables.
As a circuit tinkerer myself, I’d be appalled at anything AA-powered that fell over at 1.4v. That’s just really, really crappy design.
Noting that, take another look at the battery-life graph in the patent application, but assume that your device works fine down to at least 1.2v.
Changes things just a bit, dunnit? In fact, it looks life battery life would be better without the sleeve in a 1.2v-tolerant device.
As far as I can tell, the device could easily do what it claims: if you have a low-current device that falls over at 1.35-1.4v, this might extend your useful battery life.
First he ran tests on two “dead” AA batteries with a power meter. The batteries read 1.3 volts each. He then put the batteries inside a Bluetooth keyboard and connected the keyboard to a Mac. An onscreen display reported the batteries were toast.
The unmentioned catch is that they will not last as long at this higher voltage. It looks like they have SOME use, they’re just not magic and that’s no surprise.
[quote=“beschizza, post:21, topic:58807, full:true”]
Also, the first sentence of the post (“It betteridge!”) means NO.[/quote]
Perhaps for those readers who are 1: familiar with Betteridge’s law and 2: remember what it’s called. It’s not remotely as well known as Murphy’s.
That said, even if I hadn’t already been quite skeptical, I think that actually reading the rest of the very short, article would have been sufficient. One gets the feeling that a lot of folks don’t read more than the headline.
Alkaline batteries go bad not because the voltage is too low but because the internal resistance increases to the point that no usable amount of power can be delivered. At least, that’s the understanding I obtained as a physics major.
