Hi, You know what? I Hate marketing? You know what? I Hate worse when it comes from a university? Who should know better? Ah, here we go. Let's take a look at the University of Bristol's pioneering chip that extends sensors battery life. A lowcost chip that enables batteries in sensors to last longer in some cases by over 10 times has been developed by Engineers from the University of Bristol. Oh boy.

Okay, right off the the bat, we have some bizer type marketing here. in some cases by over 10 times. Anyway, let's give it a go. Dr Bernard Stark and colleagues in the Bristol Electrical Engineering Management research group sounds awesome.

Um have developed a voltage detector chip that requires only a few trillions of a watt. P Wats for those playing long at home to activate other circuits. The research research group are providing samples of their chip to companies to use, which will enable Engineers to design sensors that continuously listen without using power from a battery or Mains The result is smaller batteries or a battery life that is extended in some Case by years. The voltage detector can also eliminate standby power exam.

For example, the team have demonstrated a TV with no continuous drawer of power during standby by using a voltage detector that is powered up at a distance directly from the infrared signal of a standard TV controller. Sounds awesome! So what they've actually developed here is this Ubm2 voltage detector IC looks like a little five pin. so 23 Great! I Love it! And the device is sensor driven. It requires no power supply.

Instead, it uses power from a sensor signal to wake up. So it's basically an energy harvesting uh type thing. And once again, here they are touting this television with zero standby power like it's going to save the planet. So right off the bat I'm going to say that I Love ultra low power devices and researching the new devices new parts available.

This is fantastic, so nothing against against the chip whatsoever. I Think they've done a really nice job here. Typical applications: Perpetual Uh sensing event driven sensing uh Internet of Things grown but okay, um, it's a nice little chip. 0.65 volts input uh threshold trigger extremely low quiescent current of 5.4 puff at 1 volt.

That's Pico amps for those playing along at home and the output leakage. open drain current is only 100 pamps so that's really quite nice. And basically here it is. you've got energy harvesting input in this case RF but it could be infrared.

it could be uh, you know, motion, vibration, whatever it is. Um, and basically it gives you an open drain output to then further trigger a power uh switch here which then can turn your um widget off and on. be it a TV or you know, a little Internet of Things thing a bob Okay, let's watch their promotion as we go about our daily lives. Electronic devices with sensors help us to stay healthy and in this video we show a way of reducing the power consumption of these devices.

in some cases by over 90% allowing more to be done with smaller, more convenient devices. Sounds good. A sensing device uses power to do two things: listen and react. Yep, both require power.

they do. Some devices use most of their energy to do the listening hang on. An extreme case would be an earthquake, most 99% throwing out a decent number there. Quake Detector that listens for a quake for years and then react by recording the Tremor that lasts just a few seconds.

So you got to be careful what you're talking about. Here, Are you talking about an earthquake detector that just sounds a CLS and alarm when you know the building starts shaking? Or you're talking about, uh, earthquake monitoring, seismic monitoring equipment. In which case, they need to be running all the time continuously because you want to see what happened before the event. And what about little Tremors and things like that? you want to be continuously monitoring.

But hey, they do mention earthquake detectors. so 99% of the battery is wasted. But the question to ask here is, how long does the battery last? I'm glad you asked And earthquake alarm? Here it is. You're going to the frequently asked questions.

It's got a 5year battery life from a 9vol battery. Here's another one which works off a Lithium battery. It's also got a 5year battery life. So where is this BS about? This is their big example of something that you know wastes 99% of the battery power.

Yeah, it might, but it gets 5 years so it's not like you can put their whizbang new chip in there and all of a sudden get a 500-year battery life. Good luck finding one of those. Our team at the University of Bristol with government support have developed a method of eliminating keep alive power drain using minute insignificant quanti ities of energy from the event that the device is waiting for. Harves this Ms or battery powered devices exactly when needed.

Five P of energy and only around half a volt are enough to create a turnon signal. This is so little that many sensors can provide this without requiring a power supply. Sure. now, certainly with no power being used from the battery, the system is alive and listening.

So they've made out that you waste a ton of battery capacity just by listening. And you know, doing the sensor thing, reading the sensor, and just waiting for something to happen. And hey, that's true. But let's look at the practicality of this, shall we? Let's have a look at some low power microcontrollers that you might typically hook a sensor onto and how long they last.

So in a typical application for a CR 2032 coin cell battery tiny little thing with a modern low power uh micro using a wireless sensor network uh, application here where it you know PS Up for a brief period and and does stuff and then goes to sleep just waiting. Sensing Doing the sensing. It's shelf life of the battery. 10 20 year type stuff when it's just you know, turning on and doing stuff.

So what problem are they actually trying to solve here? Because it's certainly not your typical sensor application battery Life: Even with Bluetooth uh transmitting, you know every 5 seconds or whatever, you're still going to get a couple of years battery life from a tiny CR 2032 coin cell battery. It's just marketing. BS If you think your product or project might be better if it had no keep alive power drain then please get in 101 in oursite Everything like this will solve all your problems. Oh goodness.

Demo of a TV that consumes no standby power. Hello everyone! Today we want to show you television that uses absolutely no power in standby AB Television: We're measuring the power going into the television and the problem with your normal television is that when it's sitting like this in standby, it is using on average six AA batteries per day just to sit there waiting 24/7 to listen to see if you're going to press your remote. You can see our television uses absolutely no power so there are zero amps flowing into this television. It's Magic and now I'm going to turn it on for you.

It's draw zero and then it turns on. You can see the power increasing and you. can see it starting up there. We go.

Woohoo! Too bad it's all smoke and mirrors. So what we're going to do today is we're going to show this television in public, see if people like it, hopefully it'll work, and then we're going to bring it back to the lab and we're going to do a tear down. Show you what's inside this box, Show you tear down. So in other words, they're going to take it out to the gullible public.

and with their Smok and Mirrors demo, they're going to get the public to react to. Oh my. God This is fantastic. It's going to save the world.

It's got Zero standby power. Yeah right. let's go check it out that uses power that's still using power and then it turn itself off. No, no, it's completely off.

So the clever thing is is, it's completely off. No power. No power. Still W up.

You can still wake it up. That guy's going. let me have a look good on you dude. Dude.

See that box? No No No no. You pass it. See that box down in front of you. See that? W Ward That's that's the receiver.

No, no, no. look further back, look further back along the cord. So there's no trickery. There's no trickery.

The energy from that Led actually actually wakes upem. The energy from the lead from the right controller is handing wakes it up. It's clever. He likes it.

He's sold. So let's rewind that a little bit and see what's going on here. You'll notice that down here. There's their little receiver box which we'll see a tear down of at the end and they'll show us the schematic and this is a DC powered TV.

Hence why they have this external plug pack. It's taking the AC in and it's generating 12 Vols and you'll notice that they've got their current meter their am meter here in series with the 12v line. So yes, they've Switched Off the 12vt output of the plug pack. And of course the TV is drawing nothing cuz it's not getting that 12v input.

But these plug packs aren't magic. Where's that? 12 volts coming from the Oompa Loompas in Willy won's Chocolate Factory Drawing zero power? Give me a break. So how much Qus and current do these plug packs take? Well, I've got one for my monit here which runs on a 24v. Uh DC Monda Please excuse my power meter.

It looks like Sud's happened to the LCD just on the line that we actually need it. but it's uh 300 M there. Um, which is you know, fairly significant. but that's whatts if we switch over to VA here.

apparent power? it's for VA right? So depending on where you live, you don't have to pay for that apparent uh Power Commercial companies uh, generally do. but uh that me. But the system, the energy distribution and generation system still has to be designed to generate that. 4 Wats just for this little plug pack when it's got no load.

And here's another one for my camcorder: 1 and2 VA Uh, 200 M This one here is horrible at near 7 Wats and 15 VA You got to be kidding me. And they know this. They deliberately chose that 12volt DC so that they could eliminate the AC plug pack from their demo. And Wow people.

Oh, look, isn't it wonderful? So right there it is complete and utter marketing. They're claiming that This TV has zero standby power. When there's standby power in the plug pack, the plug pack doesn't magically go to zero power. And of course, they're not going to tell you about uh, other stuff like other signals in the environment that could potentially turn it on.

This guy here is clever. He actually, um, asked about what does it? pick up the other infrared and stuff like that and depending on the sensor, the earthquake sensor, or whatever like where do you set the threshold against false triggering that choose more power versus sensitivity and all that sort of stuff and no, no, it's just it's going to have a niche application, but trying to make it broad application appeal, it's not going to work. Oh I Just got to tweet it. Obviously, let's have a look inside the Box Tess button.

We have a schematic so let's have a look what we got here and it's exactly what you'd expect. the uh. infrared receivers here. They got to stack them in series to get extra voltage out of this thing that receives the lead, the energy from the lead in the remote control and that generates at least the 0.65 Vols Uh, turn on uh, trigger Threshold at the input here and then the output shorts down to ground like that cuz it's an open drain output.

But of course, open drain outputs aren't magic. You can't just magically switch the mains with that. You can't just magically switch uh, the 12vt. So what they've got here, of course, is they're going have a mosfet here, or a solid state relay whatever you want to use to.

Uh, switch the 12 vs. and notice that you've got to have a pull-up resistor here. This has to go to a voltage. In this case, it actually goes over to the 12volt input here.

And then they've got their current meter inside here. so they're actually measuring the current flowing through there like that after the Main's plug pack. But you've got this Main's plug plug pack. You've got current quiescent current being consumed in that 12volt plug pack.

They're being massively deceptive, so there's a very good reason why they did this on a 12vt TV And they didn't do it on a 230 volt, 240 volt, or 110 volt Mains Uh TV and actually switch the mains input and have true zero standby power is because it's very difficult to do that. You've got to have the pull up here in order to uh, enable that, you got to have a high enough current uh, solid state relay. And if you do get a solid state relay to try and switch the mains, if you get a Scr based one, of course, these ones actually require a significant amount of uh input current look 15 milliamps in this, uh, kind of case. And sure enough, you can get us some mosfet uh, solidate relays and stuff like that CH but they're typically uh, quite low Curren Applications like this one's only 60 volts and like either they High voltage low current or their, uh, low voltage higher current and it's not magic.

And of course you're going to have to have this pull-up resistor here. You've got to have a supply coming from there tapped off and it to power the pullup to enable you. really. But hey, to be fair, they do recognize this and mention it in the data sheet.

So sure, this thing's going to have a bunch of Uh Niche uses I'm sure it might be. You know it might even be reasonably popular. But as the UN IAL Panacea for standby powering TVs and every other consumer product, no, it's not magic. It's an open drain output.

They don't work magically. You got to have that power to switch it on. And high power devices like TVs they're are another ball game. and if equipment manufacturers want to develop a TV that takes you know Bugg all standby power.

They don't need your chip, they just need to put you know some E extra effort and some money into actually designing this way. using something like this uh TI chip which is designed to uh, have a separate wake up here and actually detect when the TV wakes up or when the product wakes up and then whoop. Switch the power through and it draws like you know, 10, 5, 10 mills or something in standby. They don't need your energy harvesting whizbang, widgy thing, it's just not needed.

but hey, you know that's not what your investors want to hear right now. Just to be fair, their widget is doing something here because the TV itself here is actually uh, going from uh, taking x amount of standby because it will have uh, its own standby power in addition to the uh, quiescent standby supply of the plug pack here. so it is doing something. it's reducing that to zero, but using this as like your Prime demo for selling this.

So I'm sorry, but your chip is not going to be useful to the likes of TV manufacturers and other uh Mains powerered products like that because that's not where the losses are. They don't need a zero input power five. Pico You know, harvesting the energy from the infrared light to be of use. The losses are elsewhere in the power supply and other places.

It's really of main application for sort of Niche Uh, you know a small sensor type low power energy harvesting stuff. So this is a ridiculous demo and I think you know it. We hope you like our standby free television No I didn't with the smoke and mirrors. Just very deceptive.

You should be ashamed. These guys know that what they're doing is. you know, pretty deceptive. Deliberately chose the 12vt DC so that you could show to people and probably investors and I believe they got government grants and stuff for doing this research and things like that.

so they got to show the results. and then of course the marketing department of Bristol University assume they've got. you know, something like that takes a marketing spin takes over and oh yeah, we can apply this to everything. Every single product in the world like? no, okay, you developed a nice little chip.

Hats off I Like it. but please just stop with the marketing. BS Unbelievable. So anyway I hope you found that interesting and informative and whenever you see start seeing marketing headlines like that, just stop and think a bit.

Analyze it and you'll find. Yeah, they're usually exaggerating things anyway. Catch you next time.