Hi Today we're going to take a look at the Bat Lab one. Here it is. It's a battery profiling tool which was, uh, sent in by the designer Doug. Thank you very much to the mailbag, but I thought I'd do a separate video because these things are rather interesting.

Unlike say, uh, the microcurrent and other current measurement tools, this one is like, specifically targeted to actually power the product under test. I.e you've got your little widget thing and you know it's going to be battery powered and you want to like estimate the battery life. You want to measure the current consumption, but it's got all sorts of different modes and you want to sort of like estimate the battery life. And for battery powered products, you know that take like hundreds of hours, uh, battery life, or even more often it's it's very difficult to do like long-term testing of those to actually get real results.

So you can just like use a microcurrent or other similar current measurement device to just estimate the current and go. Oh yeah, it only wakes up occasionally, but its base sleep current is this, or its base operational current is this? You can kind of sort of guesstimate. You know, squint, hold your tongue at the right angle, look at the battery discharge curve for the type of battery that you got and things like that, and kind of guesstimate what the battery life is going to be. Or you can spend hundreds of hours like actually powering your product to see how long it actually lasts.

But specific tools like this, um, do it with a bit. Well, a lot more finesse than just, uh, guesstimating. So let's take a look at it. So thank you very much, Doug Peters from uh, Bluebird Labs.

I'll link all this down below if you want to check it out. Yes, it's open source hardware and open source software. If we take a look at the Uh product specifications here, what do we got? Spend more time on design and less time setting up test scenarios to measure battery life. And yep, Doug realized the process of measuring an estimated battery life can be very labor-intensive again, indeed.

Tedious, Multiple tests, blah blah, and all sorts of things. So they're This is not the only one on the market. I think I may have even looked at uh one, uh, before, one or two before battery estimating uh tools. But anyway, we don't even have to do a tear down of this.

Um, and Doug's already torn it down for us. Which is, uh, fantastic. So what we've got here, you might immediately think that the screw terminals. aha, that's to measure the current.

No, this is actually to supply power to your product. I believe we can supply up to 500 milliamps. have a look at the specs in a minute, so it supplies current to your product so you don't have to dick around with power supplies or anything like that. This one thing will source the power and also measure it as well and we'll see.

The software tools are very versatile. So we've got a Usb interface and this here is not an oscilloscope output as I I thought it might be when I first got this in the mailbag, but it's actually a trigger input. Now a trigger input can be very handy because, uh, you might want to actually program your little gadget here. Use a spare pin always like have a spare pin available just for these kind of scenarios where you can actually during development you can actually program that pin to like output a trigger signal, which you can go into a product like this, or it can go into an oscilloscope.

It can go into any logic analyzer, any other tool you need to do debugging and capturing. In this case, it can say when the thing wakes up for example, from sleep mode, or when it goes into a particular high intensive processing mode or something like that, you may set software firmware in your product to actually output a trigger signal and this thing can then detect it and then like time correlate when that happens and you know, start sampling or do whatever you need to do like. If you got hooked up to an oscilloscope or a logic analyzer or something, it can trigger that and then you can capture all the data or in this particular case, um, the like, the power consumption, the current, basically so yeah, and it can simulate batteries as well. Uh, and of course.

uh yes, it's optically isolated Usb interface because I've done a whole video on how not to blow up your oscilloscope or blow up your Pc because you're like it's not optically isolated. So very nice. Um, it's got two ranges by looks of it. two range current uh, sense resistors and it's got an Msp 430 for your Msp fanboys.

Uh, provides volt and fixed uh, like you know in all your nominal voltage? Uh, typical voltage rails perfect for measuring Esp 8266 devices and stuff like that. Um, so yeah, it looks like four up to from 10 microamps to 500 milliamps. So if your device like requires like like an amp or two like surge current or something like that, this thing may not be suitable for. but for most little um, you know, internet thingies, gadgets or whatever like little lower power products which are typically powering from a battery.

anyway, um, 500 milliamps should be enough. So it's got a 16 bit uh, Delta Sigma, Adc, and one Kilohertz sample rate. Yep, no worries. So it's not going to capture like really short pulses and things like that, but often you can sort of neglect those because unless they're happening like all the time, uh yeah, you typically they're not going to impact your consumption like your average consumption over time.

Too much can capture from seconds to hours. Extremely low burden voltage because it essentially has none. because it's essentially providing the power. Although we'll have a look at the schematic in a minute.

Uh, what if optimization will improve? Uh, design features the ability. like if you go. oh, if I change from double A to Aaa batteries, how much do you know life does that? Uh, how much increased product life can I get? So that's you know. It's pretty handy and open source hardware and software.

We'll have a look at the software in a minute. Looks pretty comprehensive and he sells it on Tindy Linkedin down below. Now it's available on the git. Hubs and I did actually go over the Github and I downloaded all this and I thought oh, it's just a Python script and things like that.

But then I looked at the quick start manual and it mentioned like an exe like a Windows Xe executable so I was wondering where that was. It wasn't immediately obvious. it's actually over here in this production version like this and you download that. So I've downloaded all the software and it's got a user manual as well.

It's not that long, but it looks like it covers most of the like options and things and what they do in there. And yes, I'm not using floating green t-shirt Dave Head? Um, and it's uh, a lot of people liked it, some people didn't so I'll switch back to my original like you know, head and shoulders Dave? All right. So what we've got here is, we've got uh, the schematic, various Python uh, things that's written in the Msp430 firmware, stuff like that. So let's have a just a quick quiz at the schematic out of, uh, curiosity.

Unfortunately, it's not in the highest resolution, so some things are a little bit hard to read anyway. Um, Msp430. Up here, we've got an Ftdi Rs232 serial interface because that's how it works. We've got some Usb protection over here.

Uh, we've got a that's our isolated uh power supply here. and then we've got a serial isolator here. another isolator up here, and then this looks like. and what was it? a um ina? Uh, I can't read that.

But anyway, Instrumentation amplifier You saw that before and that's reading the or sensing the voltage across our current shunts. And we've got two current shunts here. We've got a 0.100 milliohms here and we've got a 100 ohm. And then we're going to Mosfet.

actually just shorting out the 100 Ohm. now. Uh, he's just gone with measuring the voltage across both resistors like that. So when you short out the mosfet, you're going to include the Rds on of the Mosfet in series with the 100 milliohm current sense resistor here.

and you can like get rid of that in software and stuff like that. you know I? ideally you'd have like a separate sense line coming out here, but then you've got to have a mux to switch it and you know. stuff like that. So yeah, often it's just easier.

I can understand why I did that. No worries. Now, One thing I noticed is that it's got a thousand microfarads capacitance on the output, and that's actually quite a lot, so that when your little, uh doodad under test actually takes a gulp of current, it's going to be supplied from this, uh, reservoir capacitor output capacitor here instead of actually coming through the current sense resistors like this. So you know short pulses won't actually register across there.

But then it's of course, you know you've got to pay the piper. there's no free lunch here, then the current has to go back in. and you know, recharge the capacitor So even you know, essentially, um, it does that. So it's so.

Then we're not really measuring, uh, current pulses in real time and things like that. But for a product like this that measures your average current consumption and things like that, you can get away with this. So yep, that looks all groovy. All right.

So I'm just going to plug it in and see what we get. It's just got a regular Ftdi chip in there, so it should just appear as a serial port. so if you download the production version, I showed you before you get access to the Xe and it does take a while to load up. Ah, we can't go to full screen on that so it's just a fixed size like that.

I've just got a full Hd 1920 by 1080 screen here, so there you go. It's automatically detected. Com12 that wasn't there before and we're going to connect. Could not open Com12.

Permission access is denied. Do we have to set the board rate? I assume you know it'd be fixed? You know it's only connecting to this. There's actually nothing in terms of options, which is good. You know, I know, don't like things being buried away in options.

It's nice to have them all out here flapping around in the breeze so you can play with them. Sorry, I forgot to flip my dive head. There you go. Dave head flipped.

So now if I I look the right direction now. oh no. Now it says it's connected. Com12 Oh, Error number.

Bat Lab Device connect. Oh right. I didn't see that before. I don't get it.

Anyway, Are we connected? Are we connected? I think we are. It says we're connected. Anyway, we've basically got a big graph here about milliamps versus. uh, time here.

Milliseconds? You know? I'm sure that'll automatically increment. Can we like change the axes? I'm right-clicking on that I can't see. Maybe configure subplots. Oh oh okay.

Oh look. we can change the size of it. That's interesting. We can just stretch it and modify it.

Okay, cool. Now I like how this is like separated into steps here. Step one, Step Two. Step three, Step four to give you your answer.

which is how long will my battery last for my little widget here? I assume I shouldn't have like I shouldn't have to hook anything up to it yet. Um, to actually get this to just you know, read out zero. It looks like it goes negative. Milliamps.

Um, does it. I don't think it supports that in the hardware. So yeah, it should just scale from zero. but maybe we can change that later.

So the first thing is we're going to say okay, we're going to power it from double A alkaline batteries. So beauty. So double A or Aaa. there's no 9 volt there.

but I guess you could just go well. 9 volt is like 6. unfortunately 9 volt is 46 4a cells, not triple A. So there's no support for a 9 volt battery there.

Um, that'd be nice to add because people still think power things from 9 volt batteries. I've I'm you know, a new design. micro current. I think it'll be 9 volt battery powered.

So yeah, that'd be nice. and battery capacity. Well I think a a double A alkaline is normally 2 000 milliamp hours isn't it? and the uh device under test cutoff voltage. Let's say you know I want one volts a bit low.

Let's say it's nice. I mean if you can design your product to work down to 0.8 volts per cell, um then it just the the capacity just drops off a cliff. Pretty much All right this here. Just yeah, it pretty much just drops off a cliff.

Once you're beyond, you know that's the whole batterizer thing, right? Then once you get down to 0.0 volts, there's nothing left. There's no fall. The Psu output voltage. you don't want 3.3 because the whole idea is that you power your product from the battery.

This thing is simulating the battery so you know you don't get a 3.3 volt battery. Okay, I'm switching. I switch the output on. It looks like you can't change it after the fact.

you have to switch it off. It won't let me change anything in here after I've set it like I've done my step. Maybe maybe if I refresh it, maybe reconnect it something like that. It like starts again.

Does it? It now does not let me change. It only lets me change my cutoff voltage and my milliamp hours my my cell capacity. It doesn't let me change anything else. So that's a one-shot deal.

Not sure I like that. Is this some way to like reset it? Or do you simply have to restart it? He gave me the sparkfun board. It's an Esp32 thing. Whatever that is, I don't know.

I assume he's like pre-programmed it with some like example where it goes. You know, start up like sleep mode and then uh, active mode and and stuff like that. So that's I don't know what battery that's powered from. Okay, so let's assume that we've got a Lithium polymer.

There we go. You just saw the uh curve change here and let's say cut out. Yeah, cut off. I was going to say around about 3 volts the Psu output voltage 3.6 volts.

Okay, that's what this board. I think this board is designed to. I think it has a battery that's a battery connector. It's a battery charger thing, huh? It's a thing.

Get it. Anyway, there it is. That's the uh, our device under test. I assume Doug's pre-programmed that one cell.

1600 milliamp hours. Let's let's change that to a thousand I guess to make the numbers easy if we you know if we do actually use them. Psu output on connected active event current for duration for 10 seconds. Okay, so this is how long it's going to do the capture for.

Okay, so we've got two Leds on so it's powered. Let's capture. Yep. 10 seconds worth of active capture active current.

Okay, so it's not going to give us it doesn't have looks like it doesn't have any live updating mode that that would have been nice to have. like just like a live button or something. perhaps. um, some sort of live mode would have been cool.

but because this is like a serial thing like it's not gonna. it's not gonna be fast updating. Not sure what the baud rate is, but it's like you know, 115 uh, max or whatever. Okay, let's capture active area, see if we can capture it.

There we go. It's capturing. is our board doing anything to let all the lead switched off and we've got some sort of active current here. Can we? If I move my mouse over that, I can't zoom in.

Can I draw a window? No, I have to use. Okay, there we go. It's a specific mode. zoom to rectangle.

Don't worry about those spikes up there. You know we're We're not talking much. we're only talking 100 microamps. So it's obviously in sleep mode and you can see that this is, uh, it didn't give us a range, did it? Oh no.

800 microamps to 500 milliamps? There you go. So we could have used this, uh, lower range down here, but it didn't give us the option to choose the range before we started. Okay, I missed this. It says active event current and then the step three is sleep event current.

So what you have to do is effectively. uh, force your product into an active mode, capture the active current, force it into a sleep mode, capture the sleep mode or you don't have to force it. Maybe you can just like time the operation of it or whatever. So that's why I said have spare pins on your micro controller and so you can have like a spare button on the board.

If you've got real estate on your board, you can put like a a test button where you can press it so you can put it into different, force your product into different modes. You can build that into your debug development code and then you know you can output your triggers and and do other stuff. But you can like force it into different modes and things like this and it's well worth it. It's like, you know, seconds of your time to just you know, program in a few little modes, to, you know, detect that button and then, um, force it into a mode.

So anyway, that's good. It looks like yeah, in this mode, we're obviously in the 800 microamps to 500 milliamps. And because we're only measuring yeah, 80 uh, micro amps here? Yeah, we're down in the bits. so we're down in the bit noise here.

So that's why we've got these spikes. They're just like these are. You know, the least significant digits of the 16-bit Delta Sigma converter here. so we're on the wrong range so you can't Looks like you can't choose a range for the active current, so it assumes the highest range.

It assumes the 500 milliamp range. that's a bit inflexible. Would be nice to be able to choose the range for both because you might have a really ultra low power product that only operates like less than a milliamp. There are products like that that you know don't draw more than the 800 microamps or whatever.

so there's a little bit of inflexibility there. perhaps? All right, enough bombing around. I are Tfm'd and uh, sure enough, this thing is programmed to like power up for 10 15 seconds and search for Wi-fi networks and stuff like that that's going to be drawing. you know, hundreds of milliamps and then it goes to sleep for a minute.

So that's why I'm getting weird things about. You know, if you don't time it properly, This is why the uh, the trigger sections, the external trigger input, and also this uh trigger Psu on capture option here means it can. actually when you trigger it, it powers it up and then starts uh sampling. So as I said, like you either have to, uh, custom, change your own uh product firmware to ensure that it changes modes at the right time so it's synchronized with this or you capture the various uh, you know sampling modes of this so that's what you got to do.

So yeah, it's not some you know one button magic thing. Press button here. samples all your power consumption and then estimate your battery consumption. This is specifically designed for products that have in particular like a power mode and like an on mode and a sleep mode and you have to measure those things separately so let's do that now properly.

Unfortunately there seems to be some bug here. I've just like tested this where I switched it on. You can see I'm sampling for 20 seconds and it's given me. I sampled it twice and it seems to have like added on the data to the end of the buffer.

but it's given like these lines. I'm not sure what's going on here so there's some sort of weird sampling artifact thing here happening. I'm just going to restart the software see if that fixes it all right. So we're going to say that we're powering our product from a lithium polymer battery.

Here it's one cell. let's say a thousand milliamp hours to make it nice and round. It will cut off at three volts. That's a, you know, a good cutoff voltage if you can, uh, operate down to that of course because if you've got say, the battery powering like a 3.3 volt voltage regulator, well like a low dropout one then it's going to be like 3.35 or something like that.

And that will actually right. If you've got 50 millivolts, drop out there. that'll move your uh cutoff point to here and then you're you're pissing away. You're wasting half of your battery capacity.

So a thousand milliamp hour battery, you'd be wasting it Because here's our voltage cutoff point at that red dots. So basically the area under the curve extending down to zero volts here is essentially the energy of the battery. So you can see it's you know it's going to be roughly like half half. So you're wasting like 45 to 50 percent of the capacity of that battery if you used a if you design your product to power directly from a lithium polymer battery, a single cell lithium polymer battery, and have a dropout voltage of you know, a linear regulator.

So unless you've got a switching thing, but let's assume that your product can go down to three volts, shall we? And then it uses like almost all of the capacity of that battery like there's Nafl left under that curve. There, you know, it's like like a few percent tops. Now what we want to do is we want to trigger the power supply on capture. so when we turn this on, it will only turn the power on to the device under test when we push the capture button.

So as soon as we push the capture button, it'll turn the power on. So that's uh, good because this thing will instantly like power up to consume a lot of current, do the wi-fi E thing, and then go into sleep mode. So this is where it gets a bit complicated here. We have our active uh duration here which we sample for.

This is our sample time. Now you can ch if your products on for a minute, for example, have as an on time of a minute before it goes to sleep. You don't have to capture that full minute. I believe you can just capture like you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds of it and then optimize down here for your active event duration.

We're simply doing this to measure to get a sample of our a representative sample of our on current right so we could actually set that for 20 seconds. Let's set it for 20 and then we'll capture part of the sleep mode as well. but because the sleep mode is so small it's not going to add really anything. but you don't have to capture the full thing.

Okay, so hopefully we can see a lead. Let's capture. There we go. The lead comes on right.

It's capturing. It's going to capture 20 seconds of this. So we should see peaks in the hundreds of milliamps. This is capturing the on active duration current.

Come on, you can do it Ta-da There It is. beautiful all right, So you can see like it. It started up there. it ramped up.

it peaked at about 250 milliamps. uh, maximum. And then you know, look, you've got average peaks up there of like 175 or something like that or 100 and you know, 60 something like that. Then we can zoom into those peaks if we want.

We can, you know, check them out. They're very short duration peaks up here. Um, but as I said that energy will be coming. That energy is what's going back into the reservoir capacitor.

The peaks, um could actually be higher than that, but the energy calculation is going to come out in the wash. and with the one kilohertz sampling rate, it's you know it's going to be fairly adequate. Uh, for most tasks. So let's reset that right? So that is now.

We've captured our active current there and active current 112 milliamps. Okay, now the active uh event current here is fixed. It looks like it's fixed range to the 500 milliamp range. I don't necessarily like this because you may be designing a product that has like under 800 microamps.

in which case, like on current, there are products like low power products that do that. So really, um, that's a bit of a limitation. I I like that's got a like, that's really only a software limitation really. So uh, you know, I'd like to see the option to measure to change the range to 10 micrograms to 800 microamps for the active current.

uh as well. I don't know why you wouldn't have that option in there. Anyway, Now we have to measure our sleep current. So let's go to the 800 microamp range because we know it's going to be in the you know, the like 80 microamp range or something like that for our sleep current.

So our sleep duration? let's just say 10 seconds. make sure the lead's not on when we do it. I have to this once again, this is where you have to capture it up. Sleep current out of range.

Nope. There you go, 817. We're just over Bloody Murphy. Capture sleep Current again.

Overflow. Oh no. that is so annoying. It's just out of.

This is a bad example. It's just out of the range. Now this is silly. Look.

Uh. Sleep current out of range. Try using the 800 microwave to 500 milliamp range. Captured sleek car at 1.6 microamps.

Then why can't I use the 800 microamp range? Uh yeah. we've got a few. Got a few issues here. Okay, the manual says to capture 60 seconds worth on this range.

Maybe I've just got to do it in sequence. I'll I'll just have to restart this. Okay, unfortunately, I've caused it to lock up because I hit reset during sampling. So yeah, the software's got a few little bugs in it.

All right? Yeah, I'm gonna have to close the whole thing. All right on capture for 20 capture. Go. Now.

It's not capturing what the heck. All right now. the whole thing's just crashed again. Even though I restarted it, I'm gonna have to unplug the yeah, I'm gonna have to unplug it.

I'm gonna have to look. It's just active, active active. No, let's just let's just start again. Okay, Lithium Polymer 1000.

Okay, 20 seconds capture active current. There we go. Now we're talking Okay, I'll do the 60 second capture thing straight. after there we go.

Winner winner chicken dinner. See, this is the timing thing. now you can see it. Yeah, drop off there and we've used the right range and now it's giving us the 75 microamps.

Um, that is what it's supposed to be. Um, unfortunately, it didn't get that large spike that we got there last time. So anyway, let's just run with these numbers. These are pretty darn close.

Now we can. Now, as I said, there's a difference between the capture duration up here and here and the optimized duration. Okay, so the optimized duration? As I said, if your products on for, let's go extreme. If your products on for an hour continuously, you don't have to capture up here for an hour.

You can only capture for say a minute or something like that, as long as the current doesn't really change. If it's consistent, you know? Okay, I'll just capture it for a minute and that's going to be representative. And then you can change the numbers down here. And here's where you can do all the what if stuff.

Here's where you know once you've done that, you captured your active product and your sleep current. uh, consumption, right? So this is where it gives us our estimated battery life down here. So this is for a thousand milliamp hour Lithium polymer, uh, battery. So as you can see, the captured and the optimized match precisely.

Because we haven't diddled the numbers here right, we haven't had a fiddle fiddle with them. So and then the statistics: Average: Uh. active Current: 79 milliamps? See, I don't know where it's got 79 milliamps from. Oh, right, because that's the time.

Yeah, we probably should have. Yeah, because we sampled over 20 seconds. Here's where yeah, we've come and guts. or a little bit on that because the active? yeah, we should have only sampled 10 seconds of that.

Damn it. Yeah, that that extra off time there because it's significant. Unfortunately, that's going to affect our average current which then goes into our calculations. so that's annoying.

So it looks like yeah, don't do what I did and sample off like that. sample off the cliff. So one feature I think that would be very useful here is to set essentially like a gate in time so that if you happen to like capture the wrong duration or something like you capture 20 seconds worth but it times off after 15. then you know you don't have to like get error in your calculations.

You could just like maybe on the graph you could like set you know like a cursor that says okay, I want a gate uh between here and here for example this is the like active area on ado because like if you trigger your psu capture so that when you turn it on you may have to physically go and you know go to your product and physically turn on a soft button or something like that and you don't want to capture and put into your calculation that off time when it actually took you to get to the product and turn it on. Uh, for example. So yeah, I'd like to see some sort of gating function in there. I I think that would be really valuable.

Okay, so I'm going to capture the first 10 seconds now. so then it won't go into sleep mode. So you want to make sure you only capture on the active mode and then sleep duration. Change that range there and capture sleep.

Thank you. Overflow again. Okay, so one more time, I'm going to capture 10 seconds worth. Trigger Lead comes on, Lead is on.

It's capturing. It's capturing. It's capturing. and we'll only capture the active period there.

the lead's still on. We'll wait until the lead goes off. Wait until it goes off. Come on.

Go off. Turn off. There we go. So it's now in sleep mode.

Okay, we'll choose that and then we'll capture our sleep mode. Bingo. We're good to go, right? So we've got our captured uh, current down here. 112? Yep, looks like 112 there.

unfortunately. Look, you go to capture your event sleep current. It doesn't give you your waveform for your sleep current. Why? Like I I want to see the waveform for my sleep current.

The hardware can do it. Why can't I like? why can't you have two graphs and then you can like switch between them? I have a button here saying you know it should store both of them like active event current and then sleep event current and I should be able to. You know, see between those two waveforms. Um, okay yeah because you want to see the activity, you want to see what it's actually doing in sleep mode as well as active mode.

You know sleep mode can be doing stuff. It doesn't have to be just sleeping there at one just you know thing. It might be waking up you know, every second to read a real time clock it could be doing. You know, something else.

So the software seems to be have been initially written for like a very specific circumstances. It's it's sort of not really taking into account more general usage, uh, scenarios. but you know I'm sure Doug will, um, keep adding stuff or edit yourself. It's open source software, but anyway, here's where we can do the cool what if calculations.

We have all our captured data and we have our optimized data here. Here's where we can fiddle with the numbers in the optimized part. Now at the moment, we've got our estimated battery life down here and the caption the optimize matches the capture because all the numbers are the same. Now we can fiddle with the numbers.

Now here's where I said if you if your products on for an hour and you only captured uh, you know, 10 seconds or a minute of it or something, here's where you can actually change the active event current duration. Okay, so you've captured the current so you want to leave that the same unless you want to manually fiddle with it. But we don't But let's just say, well, we we know it was like 15 seconds round about there, right? So let's go 15 seconds like that and you'll see that that has already changed our battery life from one point you know from two two and a half days to one and a half days. Or you know, 60 hours down to 43 hours.

And you know you're the product designer. so you'll know exactly how long it's supposed to be on. Of course, you know, so you don't have to guesstimate that. Um, so now our sleep duration.

Let's just leave that at 60 seconds. But if we wanted to, let's say it only woke up every you know, thousand seconds or something like that. Okay, then we can see. Whoa.

Bingo. No, you've gone from 43 hours here and for a thousand it's Oh. we now get 560 days battery life because we've extended out the duration so the active on period is only a small little part of the entire you know longer it sleeps for. Of course the you know peak current is still the same, your on current's still the same, but it's a proportion of the time so it's a small duty cycle of that.

It's a small on time so the average current is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller and the average current gets more. Your battery life goes up and up and up and this is where you can fiddle around with it. You know you could do our effective battery capacity. That's to do with like, losses in the battery or Esr or other.

you know things like that, losses in your system. Um, and yeah, you can just have a fiddle around. And of course we can change those numbers. Let's say, but the point of measuring it is that so you don't have to fiddle with the numbers because you've got actual measurements.

But if you know you can actually override them So you can fiddle around to your heart's content here, and you know, optimize your battery life. Now, unfortunately it doesn't I I assumed that when this like because this simulates a battery, it doesn't seem to simulate the discharge of the battery. Now I would expect A and I'm sure you know this can be added right in because it's just a software thing. The hardware can do it.

Uh, there's no reason why that this thing couldn't actually simulate the discharge characteristic curve. Uh, because during development of products, you might want to test the performance over the discharge curve for example. So it'd be nice if it had like some sort of mode where you could go. you know, simulate battery or something like that and it actually simulates the profile.

And then that allows you also to like rapidly and easily efficiently test your battery, cut off voltages and what your product does when the battery cuts off and things like that you don't have to stick your batteries in or or you know, get your power supply and tweak the knob. you know, until you get right down there. This can like simulate the discharge curve, but unfortunately the software at the moment it doesn't seem like it can do that. So that would be a really nice addition if we could do battery simulation because that's the whole idea.

This is you know, purpose designed to effectively replace the battery in your product, so the software should have the capability to at least follow the discharge profile of the particular battery that you've set. Now unfortunately after we've captured all this data, okay I can't then go up and change my battery type. I'd like oh what if I put a lithium polymer in there or what if I change it to alkalines? or what if I you know change it to some other you know type of cell? I'd like to be able to after capture the data, experiment with the battery chemistry here. Unfortunately, the only thing we can exist.

Um, you know, experiment with is the Uh is is the capacity and the cutoff here. So can we? Well, 560 optimize? There you go. You've got to hit Optimize again and you know, 1100 hours for twice the battery uh, capacity you know and three times the battery, capacity. will.

Bingo. 1680 hours and stuff like that. So yeah, I would have liked to have been able to, you know, fiddle with these perhaps? Um, that would have been nice. So there you have it.

That's a reasonable example of what the bat lab one can do. There's a few shortcomings in there, which uh, but the hardware I think is, uh, capable of doing more. and the software. There's a few little bugs in there, so I'm sure they'll get, uh, fixed over time.

Few little polish things as I said, you know, display. uh, the sleep current. So yeah, I do, you know. Show me my sleep current please.

And not just the active current. So yeah, this is just like a cool tool that allows you to just do like you know what if stuff and play around and optimize for your battery current consumption. Of course, you know the real world is going to be like a little bit different to what you actually calculate here. The optimized value.

I'm not sure what to call it optimize. would you call it calculated or something? So yeah, this is already quite a useful uh tool. It's just yeah. it'll grow because it's only new.

So yeah, bug fixes and other and feature add-ons and uh, stuff like that and it's all open source. So yeah, um, somebody could just go berserk with this thing. That would be great. Okay, tell us the price, son, let's go to.

the Tindy includes. uh, Bat. Batlab One includes software. Well, the software you can just download, so I'm not sure why there's alright.

No enclosure. Okay, but yeah, it includes the software, so that's really quite nice value. Um, really? I yeah, that's that's great. Uh, like, you're probably at that price.

You wouldn't bother building it yourself. Um, unless you had a specific requirement to modify it or something like that. But the githubs. It's got.

like, you know, the Pcb I assume it's got the yeah, it's got the board file and uh, yep, the original. Yep, the Cad files. Um, so yeah, and Mit license based and all that sort of stuff. So uh, quite a useful little tool.

The software, I, I think you know it can add some more flexibility and stuff like that, but for basic starter stuff, um, that could be really useful. So there you go. That's the Bat Lab one. I rather like that that's going to come in quite handy I think.

And really having a specific optimized tool for the tasks like this. like having specific software that actually does this. Yes, you can do all this with just your multimeter if you want. You can force your product into sleep mode.

You can, you know, put your multimeter into the you know, low current mode, measure the sleep current, then you can put it into active mode. You can measure the current, and then you can get out the data sheets for the batteries, and then you can do the calculations and then you can try and figure it all out. and you can, you know, do all this. But something like this just allows you to do like a what if? uh thing? You know, What if I change my battery chemistry and stuff like that? What if I change my cutoff voltage? As I said, you might want to re-optimize your design.

You might change from a a linear regulator to a switching converter to get lower dropout voltages or something like that. This thing can tell you that. So that's yeah. That's really quite good.

I love that it's all open source hardware and software, so I'm sure people will, uh, improve on this and Doug will no doubt, uh, improve as well. He did ask for uh, feedback, so thank you very much Doug for sending that. Then that is really cool. So linkedin down below, leave your thoughts down below as well and as always, discuss over on the Eev blog forum because that's where everyone discusses like Tesco like this: Very cool.

Catch you next time you.