EEVblog #1331 - BattLab One Review

Review of the BattLab One open source battery life estimator tool from Bluebird Labs.
A tool that allow you to measure the current and power consumption of your product in active and sleep modes and do "what if" analysis on estimating product battery life.

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[douglaspeters]

Hi Dave thanks for the review! I really appreciate the feedback and I will get busy on those software enhancements. I’m seeing a spike of orders on my Tindie site, so many that Tindie thinks it’s fraud and froze the account until they can investigate! Please be patient, they, will figure it out.

[damnyutoobe]

Dave, you can actually build fully packaged exe type applications with python. That's what Battlab-One seems to be doing. The exe can be built with tools like pyinstaller. It puts the python environment, scripts and other libraries into a single executable. It's pretty neat.

[nftmaster]

Just to nitpick here: LiFePO4 is not lithium polymer but lithium iron phosphate.

[superchromat]

When someone who doesn’t read the manual meets an elec eng who is writing software ;)

[MarkFunderburk]

I have one small complaint, and it didn't really affect the video at all but I have to get it out of my system lol. The battery you kept referring to as a lithium polymer is actually the abbreviation for a Lithium Iron Phosphate (they are quite different).

[StreuB]

Really nice product. Well thought out and I love these analysis videos. I learn so much from them. Thanks to Doug and Dave!!

[douglaspeters]

Ok Tindie site back up and running....

[CoolMusicToMyEars]

Dave, for sure it would be nice IF the voltage would go upto 9V (PP3 Battery) 4.5V is very low voltage when there are 9V batteries out there, They could have placed a up converter in the unit to cope with this situation,

[Pocketninjanight]

I bought one, it was easy to use and saved a ton of time doing battery calculations.

[MattHollands]

I'm a bit suspicious of that PMOS in series with the 0.1ohm resistor. Would be interesting to know exactly what PMOS he is using but it's not included in the BOM...

[FesixGermany]

Seems to be a nice little thing, what really bothers me is having a look at the .brd file and seeing the edges of the ground pours on top and bottom layer do not lign up. Triggers me hard.

[killymxi]

Dave-test is like mom-test for your product.

[TheEmbeddedHobbyist]

@16mins that graph looks like 1bit noise. See that a lot when using ad's with low inputs compared to the ref signal level. This was common when we were measuring pA from a isfet sensor.

[jared]

Coming from someone who has experience with a big expensive keithley 2281s battery simulator, this product seems like it has a lot of potential! I think a few software tweaks could go a long way and make this a solution for like 90 percent of people who want a battery simulator/ current measurement device! I'm sold if I ever need something like this for personal use!

[donepearce]

Well, that looks like a useful device. As you say, the software to date looks a bit-single purpose, but hey, it's open source so hopefully it is well written and easy to expand to a much more general application. The predicted battery life function is great, but I would like to know whether it is based on manufacturers' data or some extended measurements. I remember when I was designing radio pagers we had a wall covered in battery connectors which we would fill with various manufacturer types and just leave them on extended test. We designed our own A/Ds and data loggers.

[kardeef]

I think the reason for its voltage and ampere range is because it sources its power through the USB and that is what's limiting its voltage and ampere range.

[Mann]

Cool device! I was talking to one of the R&D guys at work last week and he was doing current tests and battery life analysis. He build a similar battery simulator that can capture currents down to a couple of nanoamps. The devices he was testing usually have a battery life of over 10 years from a single lithium battery.

[AndrewSkow]

I loved the floating head. Find a green, long sleeve turtleneck!

[xbenedikt]

@EEVBlog, concerning your greenscreen, in the top right source video, you might want to decrease the size of your head and then scale it up again and crop it slightly, so that your head stays at the same size, but your working area is larger and you don’t always go off-screen and clip at the edges of the frame.

[pcbfiles]

Offtopic. Hi Dave, thanks to you I bought a Hakko soldering station instead of Weller's. I just wanted to say thank you. Greetings from Mexico you are tremendous!!!