Next up we go on for the United States of America from Colorado Hi to all my viewers in Colorado This is from Ionitech, thank you very much and I know what this is and it could be really interesting. It's not something we've had on the mailbag before, so let's check it out. It's a really interesting bit of Kit So I'm curious to see what actually happened here. Oh, they sent me a shirt.

There you go. I've got it on my ionitech shirt and the aesthetic symbol might give you a bit of a spoiler of what's going on here. Here we go. It's the stat IQ band the stat IQ Band by Ionitech wirelessly measures human body voltage and provides audible alarms that identify SD concerns enabling.

Newfound Mobility around the workplace made in Colorado in the United States of America Yes, the blurb was on the back I didn't memorize that. So yeah, this is a static. It's not an anti-static wristband. it's a wristband that monitors.

uh, well, look at that good doctor. Oh, we've even got is that a certificate of calibration? Thank you very much. Ah, oh that's sexy. Wow, this is a really interesting bit of Kit This is.

this is really sexy. Let's see if it works. So here it is is our cow sheet. It just uses a high voltage, uh, power supply here, so they calibrate it at a given, uh, distance as you've seen me do in my static video.

Now look at this. Look at the gold plating on there. Oh wow, doesn't that look sexy? It's really designed as like an armband. uh thing.

and they show you that up here. It's not really designed to go on the wrist because it is like it. It is quite huge. I mean check that out.

So designed to put up on the arm like that and uh, it basically designed to tell you if your body's charged up to, you know, some sort of our threshold. It looks like we've got a shoe phone app here. Um I assume it like beeps internally or whatever and well, oh oh, there we go. Oh look, it's spinning.

spinning. Yeah, check it out. They've got like a little spinny wheel in there, so watch it. There we go.

It spins up and you can't hear that. it's silent, but they're using that to rotate. That's interesting. They're using that as some sort of like some sort of Chopper measurement system or something.

Anyway, um, it looks like we've got an alloy back on here. It's very like, very professional. Um I don't know the cost of this. I'll put it up here, but I'm sure it's not particularly cheap.

This is not something that a hobbyist would buy right. It's designed for like a a serious um ESD environment in, you know, like really high-tech um, expensive, state-of-the-art Labs that have you know, really expensive equipment that you're working on. So yeah, um anyway, it's interesting. So USBC it's obviously got a rechargeable battery in there and so here you go.

I've got their uh ESD shirt on and I've got a apparently you've got to strap it to the outside so it's designed obviously designed for like ESD lab coats obvious sleep. but I'm just going to wear the shirt here I might try the lab coat later. in fact I've got a full clean room ESD Bunny suit. Um, but yeah, it would spinning.

Let's download the app and see if we can actually get any measurements. I've got the shoe phone here. installed the app available for the Androids and uh, it asks for the location but I think it might only need this because this is a Bluetooth thing. Even the 121 GW meter app does this because it's just a requirement of the Bluetooth the driver.

It's really annoying anyway. only while using the app. uh, took in a relative no enable G Why does it need you? No this is getting silly Now GPS Location Bugger off Can I cancel it available Devices please enable GPS Location What? What? I Can imagine that being a security concern for companies. Maybe I don't know, but how am I supposed to go I'm inside a lab Anyway, there it is.

I think it's just for driver reasons I suspect Anyway, statband there it is. It actually detected it. No worries. I'm I'm connected to it now and look it's got the voltage and Drake oh my feet.

My feet. There you go. I'm dragging my feet on the carpet I got my rubber soled shoes on minus 1500 volts. There you go.

That's interesting. and if I go back to the ESD mat. Whoa, look at that. Bobby that's working.

That is working. Wow. I Like that, don't know what those red dots are EST event right? Is that? because it is. Is that a rate of change thing? Uh, that doesn't seem like a level.

It seems like a rate of change. And if I keep my hand on the mat and I rub the feet like this, you can see that it's really attenuating that yeah and eventually drains back out that that is working. Nice. Anyway, this shows the battery.

uh up here and uh, buzzer threshold. Okay, so it didn't It didn't buzz on me. Alarms audible. There you go.

Yep, there you go. It's beeping. Ah, this is great. Nice well and you can get with slower intervals one minute and five minutes.

This is very impressive. Oh now I can actually hear it I can just briefly hear the little motor in it. Now it's gone. Don't know what happened there.

Maybe it's sped up. Yeah, there we go. I Just heard it again. Maybe it's like it's spinning up and down or something like that.

Anyway, there are leads on there. Oh, green and blue. Blue is obviously the I believe the connection because I haven't even rtfmed yet, right? and like anyway, it's it's doing the business. You can set the alarm volume, but that's basically it.

You don't want any more complexity than that. I mean the more complexity you have, the more you're going to come a gutter. but that's that's really quite nice. And you can have multiple devices.

so I don't don't know how many maximum you know, multiple people in the lab or whatnot. what? Yep, there we go. and there also seems to be a direct correlation between in the impedance of my Earth in and like if I'm just standing here on the floor like this. Okay, and then if I touch the mat which is uh, Earth uh, some way away then obviously we can.

You know because it's got the uh resistive uh spread across the mat. You know it. It still keeps it low, but it's not zero. and then I grab my ESD uh wrist strap and I've still got and that's going directly to Maine's Earth via a couple of Meg and if I go directly to Maine's Earth by touching my oscilloscope ground I'm really not doing anything there, so this seems legit.

If I've got like a loosey-goosey earth strap it's a little bit loose there, then you know there's there's a bit more generation. But if I hold that B and C boom Wow. Well I got the full cleaner in bunny suit including the Um including the boots and it's just it's it's going off the scale. Um, it doesn't like it at all.

So maybe I've got to stop it and recalibrate and turn it on. Maybe it recalibrates itself I don't know what the deal is I Should Rtfm Really? No, you can see, it's just it's constantly High there even if I ground myself like I got my ESD strap just like I was before. but for some reason on this full, clean room bunny suit, it's something's out of whack. It's the bunny suit because you remember this thing I did actually take it through a complete mud obstacle event.

So I'd say this bunny suit is uh yeah, kind of ruined the thing. Yeah I didn't anticipate ah, water pooling in the suit like that. A little bit of a truck for young players that one. for those who want to do this All right.

Thank you Now I've got a proper air working EST on and uh, but once again, I've got it back on and it seems to be operational again. so I'll swipe my feet like that and boom, ground myself on the ESD mat and we're back to normal. So yeah, so that's actually probably not a bad test to show you that this thing actually picked up a dodgy ESD um, the bunny suit because this thing they said you have to have it on a proper working ESD uh, you know, shirt or lab coat or something? Yeah, because I think that thing got destroyed when I took it through a mud obstacle event and even then it was, uh, completely used and worn out. so it was even a dodgy obsolete back then before I even took it through the obstacle event.

But anyway, this is working. But I know what you're thinking Dave is this thing BS or is it actually legit? Well, I've got my uh surface DC volt meter here from Alpha Labs which I've calibrated the distance at one inch here to a metal plate and well, we can basically ground this uh plate. So I've got it grounded at the moment. Okay, so we can reset this.

Let's disconnect the ground and we reset it. Okay, so there you go. It's a five volts. Like, you know, there's nothing doing there.

Okay, and let's have a look here at this and let's see. I'm going to build up, build up, build up and we're gonna have to get a stable voltage. But hopefully okay, it's at now 600 volts. Let's call that 500.

Let's wait until it gets to 400, then I'll charge this plate to 400 volts. Here we go. Boom and a 350. It's actually dropped a bit.

It's it's pretty close. It's a 330. Yeah, that's you know, give or take. Like you know, um, 10 or 20 volts or something like that.

It's pretty close, but that's what you expect. You know you don't expect it to be accurate to a vault or whatever. Anyway, I can build that up to basically I don't have to touch it It's four or five. just under 400 490 volts.

Yep, yep, and this plate is going to be equal to that should be six. Yeah, 640. that's pretty darn close and hopefully you're seeing that that's pretty impressively close. It did Peak over a kilovolt? There, you saw it reset.

remove the ground and we can try it again. 360. that's pretty close. Yeah, this is.

this is pretty close. This is great. Let's see if I can get bigger. sorry I should wear better underwear to generate more.

But yeah. 1.1 kilovolts. Yep, Yep, Yep, we're just on one. Yep, that is bang on.

Wow. I'm impressed and you can see that plate was isolated from the bench there. so that's a pretty accurate validation test that this thing is not BS This actually works. so I'm sure there's some you know, patented technology.

uh, behind this. this is all the company. Uh, does it's a startup who's specifically does this sort of uh thing. One of, uh, the founders is a former Professor from the University of Western Sydney here and they also provide you with this uh, nice little uh, grounding calibration, uh plate and you just stick this in here and it should beep and is it gonna beep? Yep, there it is.

And yeah, it's referenced back to zero so you might be wondering how the heck does this work? I Mean it seems like magic, right? but it's not magic, it's just clever What it is is, it's basically a Uh DC surface voltmeter like this which uses a uh plate like this. And of course it's calibrated. It tells you you know it's calibrated uh, one one kilovolt at one inch, right? So that's why I calibrated it at one inch from the surface of the plate and at this surface DC volt meters. You can buy these.

They're as common as mud, right? and there's proven science. Once you charge up a plate, then the electric field at a distance, you can actually measure that. So how this works is you can see it's got the conductive bands on here. so that's actually measuring.

uh, the basically the surface of your body through. Of course that's why you've got to have a conductive ESD code and that it also explains why that dodgy ESD coat which obviously is is crap now. um, it didn't work because it was basically an insulator and you've got an insulator between there and it's and the uh spinning uh detection plate on the top or the spinning detection mechanism on the top because it's not just that uh one plate. So that just upset, um, all of the reading.

So that's why it didn't work. But when I put on a real working ESD code or I used the shirt that they are provided the proper uh conductive coat, then it's actually measuring the surface of my body. So what they've got here is basically a similar thing. They've got a plate which is separated by a distance to um, basically the grounded uh, your grounded body here.

So it's like I mean you could? It's kind of sorta get the same thing if I you know, strap this thing with a spacer to my body I could actually like go around and I could um, you know, basically measure my body as well. but this uh is a bit cleverer because it's got a hence why it's got a spin I believe is that it's are going to be like periodically grounding the thing otherwise the charge would build up and you know it had just it had run away and uh, you know you wouldn't get any accurate readings. but this uh samples at uh, 1200 times a second and they've got the spinny plate so you can obviously see down in there that they've actually got. Well, there's effectively three.

There's the spinning plate and then you can see that there's an inner Um shape on the PCB there and then there's an outer one as well around there and it's this ground ring connected to the plate. I'm not exactly uh, you know, sure of the uh, exact implementation of it, but it's basically working as and basically an auto zero in an or an auto correcting I guess you could call it surface DC Voltmeter because it's just designed to be physically um, separated from your body. So of course, it's only going to work if you have that, uh, conductive? uh, surface of course. So yeah, it's brilliant.

The they've been able to implement uh, this thing because obviously you know the spinning plate is obviously a part of the auto correction. You know technology inside this thing that allows you to get a constant update and I it works. Wow, it is like magic, but there's basically pure science behind this and they explain all the physics behind it in the user manual. But I'll insert a clip here from Uh, one of the designers and founders of this thing.

Um, yeah, Explain briefly, explaining down the work. I'll link the full video in down below. How does Iona's device actually measure the human body voltage? All conductive objects have some capacitance. For simple shapes, like a sphere, we can calculate it for more complex shapes like a human body.

It's a little harder, but they all have a basic intrinsic capacitance and when that capacitor requires some charge, then the voltage of the object goes up according to a well-known equation of equals charge over capacitance. We can't measure that voltage directly. In order to do so, we'd have to have some kind of wires to a Voltmeter. What we can measure, however, is the electric field produced from the skin of the body.

and Iona has developed the world's smallest and most accurate electric field sensor. What we call an electric field mole that measures that electric field It's well known in physics that the electric field is proportional to the charge density the amount of charge that's on the skin of the body below that electric field sensor. From the charge density, we can make an estimate at the amount of charge on the whole body. We can just multiply or extrapolate that charge density to the charge on the entire body.

Once we know that we have the charge, we have the capacitance and we can calculate the voltage. So our sequence of of measurement goes from electric field to charge density to Total charge to voltage. And that is how Iona is able to make a body voltage measurement without any wires. There are a few scenarios in which the relationship between E field and body voltage breaks down.

For example, if I'm naturally charged and I stand next to a grounded workstation or wall, the charge Distribution on my body will be asymmetric and the voltage measurement from the static band will be slightly higher or lower than my actual voltage. However, the polarity is always correct and zero charge means zero voltage. Second, if I stand next to a Charged insulator such as this acrylic, Banner the charge panel will induce a charge in my body even if I am grounded and the static band will detect this. Just remember that a non-zero voltage measurement from the static band always indicates the presence of charge on the user, which should be considered an ESD concern.

But yeah, it's basic physics and a clever implementation correction system so it can sample uh, really fast and you know if it gets out of whack, you can actually re uh, zero and recalibrate the thing. hence neat. Anyway, that is not BS at all that actually works. So very impressive.

Bit of uh, interesting bit. A very industry specific kit. once again, you know for a very niche market I'm sure they're not going to sell millions of these things, but the people that need this are going to think that this is the absolute Ducks guts. so it's very impressive.

So thank you very much. um Iona Tech or for sending that into the mailbag and I decided to spin this out as a separate video. It's so interesting. so yeah, that is not BS unlike those anti-static Wireless wristbands which I'll put the video up here if you haven't seen it.

that's just a joke. but hey, um LCSC their Factory was using those Wireless wristbands until I pointed it out to them and showed them by video and they went oh oops sorry we'll use real is the bands in the future thank you very much. Anyway, I'll link that video in if you haven't seen it. So anyway, that that gets a big thumbs up that is really a fantastic bit of Kit So there you go.

That's the stat IQ or static I'm sure it's how it's pronounced uh, banned from Iona Tech and that is really amazing. Now Unfortunately, they don't have a price on the website like I said. It's really only for like, really professional uh businesses who take ESD incredibly seriously. and of course with the multiple users and this can I think report back to the cloud and it can.

cloud storage and stuff. So the QA department is just going to wet their pants over getting this sort of uh data from their users walking around in the lab when you know you're like hundred million dollar space probe that's going to Pluto or whatever, you don't want to blow the thing and you can actually detect whether or not and continuously monitor uh people walking around. and I think it's got a 16 hour uh, battery life in it so you charge it up in the morning and is going to do the entire day's business. So that is real super clever.

So yeah, don't ask the price. Well, you can go and ask them the price if you're serious. Um, you bet. I'm sure it costs a very pretty penny, but wow, wow that is a remarkable bit of uh Tech and it does actually work.

Fantastic and so hats off to uh getting a physical practical implementation of this. I Can't imagine this would have been an easy design to do. and just like my uh surface, uh DC Voltmeter has a grounding uh point on it, so does this There you go. so you can actually just connect that in for various uh scenarios where uh, you can require that.

but you can basically use this as a surface DC Voltmeter. It's going to work exactly the same as this a set essentially, but it's designed to go onto your body and then it continuously work work all day. And auto Zero order, auto correct itself. um to ensure you know reasonable calibration.

Once again, be accurate to a vault You know a few tens of volts is just uh fine. It's designed and it can measure those ESD events that actually are fast and pulse down and they're the really Troublesome one. So you can just imagine somebody sitting in the QA Department the clocks on sound because somebody ESD impulsed in the new uh NASA you know, satellite uh, construction room or whatever and they race down there and ride who? Why? We know who it was because we've got your ID from this thing and and it does remote firmware updates as well through the app like oh wow, Unbelievable. Uh yeah, this thing's not going to be cheaper Anyway, as always, thoughts and comments on that down below and over on the EV blog Forum Catch you next time.

Oh foreign.