I have interesting results! The discharge test of the gps unit using two boost converters (one for each AA battery) in series just finished. It ran for 10 hours, which is almost exactly what batteroo got in their video using batteriser. Very interesting!
I think the reason the AA's without boost converters ran for 17 hours if because the firmware dims the screen at a certain voltage for alkaline batteries, so it gets lower current draw for the last half of the battery, allowing it to go really long. I think I might retest WITHOUT boost converters tonight, only I'll set the battery type to lithium in the firmware so that it doesn't dim the screen to give it an apples to apples result against batteriser.
Precisely. This is not surprising, this is the expected result!
This GPS unit is
ALREADY DESIGNED to maximize battery life! The designers even went to the trouble of providing optimized settings for three different types of batteries. Using an added boost converter will not add any battery life, it will always
decrease it due to the additional losses in the unnecessary additional DC-DC boost converter.
The designers of the GPS intentionally
added the feature which limited backlight usage on alkaline cells to maximize the battery life! All that adding a Batterizier will do is defeat this
intentionally engineered-in battery life extension which can
already be accomplished with the settings provided on the unit if one really desires the backlight to stay fully functional at the expense of battery life!
5ky, I would expect you to get, perhaps, 11-12 hours at best with the GPS set to a low-cutout, non-alkaline setting which disables the backlight power saving feature. It should likely be just slightly longer than using the external boost converter to "fool" the GPS due to the reduced losses from not having an extra DC-DC converter in the power supply chain, only using the one which is already in the GPS. This will really just depend on the exact cutoff voltages of the various DC-DC converters being tried, etc.
There seems to be every indication that the Batterizer folks know exactly what they're doing, how they're saying it and how misleading it all is to make some money. This type of thing is not a new strategy, it is done all the time in many industries and often gives people who make honest products and breakthroughs a tough hill to climb for public acceptance. This one is just ridiculously easy to dismiss as crapola by anyone who actually understands how this stuff works.
As for them
now asking for feedback about what devices they should optimize for, etc. etc... You would think this should have been done long before a claim to the mass media to have "solved" the horrible "wasted battery capacity" issue which doesn't really exist. This is the kind of basic product project engineering that should go on
long before anyone even goes for a patent but of course the patent system is now more used for something along the lines of "here's an idea nobody has patented before, lets patent it with a patent so broad that so nobody except us can ever produce anything like it without us still making money, even if it's a fundamentally flawed idea". I'm sure this is not how the patent system was envisioned when it was created but it's also certainly not the first time this kind of thing has happened over the past, oh, couple hundred years...
The concept of a DC-DC boost converter is not new, the design is somewhat obvious and the only thing they claim to have done is make one as a sleeve that a battery will snap into and still fit into most products. I have a difficult time believing it's going to even fit properly into most products, but that's really their only properly possible claim.
The most useful kind of "Batterizer" would be one which changes the discharge curve of a NiCd or NiMH to mimic an alkaline battery to make them a drop-in replacement for an alkaline. The rechargeable battery companies could even build that INTO these special rechargeable cells without any problem (they could shrink the actual cell size to make room for the electronics) kind of like a typical rechargable Lithium chemistry battery pack will have control electronics in it. It can include short and deep-discharge protection, adjust the voltage output to vary like an alkaline so battery meters would still function, etc, etc. Why the rechargable companies never did that already, I don't know, though with todays use of DC-DC converters in most devices that would benefit from that, it's really a moot point, there just aren't that many cases where it's necessary or desired. This kind of idea should be obvious to anyone with basic understanding of the subject matter and so should be non-patentable, though various
actual implementations could be protected by patents, industrial designs, etc. if new and novel.
This whole debacle is
SO[/b] aggravating to watch for those of us "
in the know!" Grrrrrr....