BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

Name: BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer
SKU: 20114
Price: 99.00 USD
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 4.35 (5 reviews)

(5 Reviews)

A design tool for capturing current profiles of battery powered devices and optimizing battery life for your IOT projects.

Designed by Bluebird Labs in United States of America

2021-02-23T17:43:18.588Z-Untitled_Panorama-1.jpg

$99.00

Out of Stock

Sold out since Sep 30, 2022

A design tool for capturing current profiles of battery powered devices and optimizing battery life for your IOT projects.

What is it? In my experience building battery powered devices over the past few years, I have realized the process of measuring and estimating battery life can be very labor-intensive. The process i…

What is it?

In my experience building battery powered devices over the past few years, I have realized the process of measuring and estimating battery life can be very labor-intensive. The process is tedious, with multiple test equipment arrangements to capture current profiles for different firmware states, manual data logging, and spreadsheets for data input and calculations to get to an estimate of battery life for my device under test (DUT).

I needed a better way, which led me to build the BattLab-One (Battery Laboratory). My goal was to deliver a design tool that quickly and effortlessly provided an estimate of battery life for my projects, enabling me to spend more time on design and less time on measuring and calculating battery life.

The BattLab-One Hardware:

Replaces the battery of your project by providing a power supply unit with standard battery voltage output and then uses the built-in current sense technology of the BattLab-One to capture the current consumption profile of your device.

Captures active event and sleep mode current at a 1kHz sample rate / 16 bit ADC resolution
MSP430 device simulates standard batteries for Li-Ion, LiFePO4, Alkaline, NiMh, NiCd
Provides voltages of 1.2V, 1.5V, 2.4V, 3.0V, 3.2, 3.6V, 3.7V, 4.5V at up to 450 mA , perfect for measuring your ESP8266 devices power demands.
Trigger input to capture firmware states and the impact on battery life
USB 2.0 Type B connection to PC
Long active event capture duration from seconds to hours
Extremely low burden voltage across all ranges (BattLab-One provides PSU output)
Offers what-if optimization analysis to improve the design of your project
USB power and data isolated from PSU output to avoid ground loops
Open source hardware and software

The BattLab-One Software:

Estimates the battery life of your project using the DUT cutoff voltage, battery state of charge data, event duration, and captured active and sleep current profiles (requires Battlab-One hardware).

Provides "what-if" optimization by letting you change your battery chemistry, current profiles, active and sleep duration as well as cutoff voltage to understand the impact on battery life for your project
Simulates standard batteries for Li-Ion, LiFePO4, Alkaline, NiMh, NiCd
Features the ability to save profiles so you can compare your DUT current profiles
Interactive/detailed active current plot so you can look for anomalies and identify performance improvements for your project
Open source hardware and software

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Review Breakdown

Average Ratings

Product: (3.60)

Documentation: (4.20)

Shipping: (4.80)

Communication: (4.80)

Christopher | April 12, 2021

Useful tool

I've found the BattLab-One a helpful tool to determine how a change in MCU firmware affects power consumption of the DUT. The cost vs reward ratio is quite fantastic. It is not without it's quirks, but once you use it a few times you'll figure out how to work around them.

A few things to note:

1. The DUT Sleep Duration value on the main screen is only used for calculations. To change the actual sleep mode duration you want to capture for, the setting is in the Options pull down menu at the top. It defaults to 1 second which is insufficient if you say have a BLE device that only advertises every 4 seconds for example.

2. The unit appears to sometimes report strange usage patterns if the DUT is sending a PWM signal to an LED for example. To deal with this, sometimes you need to run the Capture again.

3. Be sure you set your output voltage before click PSU Output to On. You can fry some sensitive components this way. Fortunately the software starts up with a default value of 1.5V which is usually not going to cause much a problem.

4. The sleep current range setting may need to be adjusted back to the default of 800uA-500mA if you are making use of the 'Persist Sense Resistor' function. Otherwise when you wake your DUT up, it could brown out.

And one suggestion I have for the developer:

It would be nice to see the Data Acquisition settings to obviously separate from the Data Calculation settings. Mixing them together is a bit confusing. I would move 'Number of Cells', 'Battery Capacity', 'DUT Cutoff Voltage', and 'DUT Sleep Duration' down near Step 4 as they have no bearing (that I can tell) on to how the data collection is performed.

Thanks for making a great tool!

Jean-François | Jan. 14, 2021

Not a great UI experience

I was very excited with my purchase, but was quickly disillusioned when I received my battlab-one. It’s not the hardware finishing, but the software that is really the problem.

The user interface is really difficult to use, it is not clear and also complex to run a new battery analysis. It is also a great pity that we cannot do measure continuously (real time).
Another point that bothers me but this time on a hardware level, is the blue LED which is always active, I would have imagined that the LED would be On when I activate the Battlab-one output. Once again, since the UI is anything but clear, we no longer realize whether the output is still activated or not. Knowing that the DUT probably doesn't have a status LED.
Last but not least, that really bothers me is the 10 uA minimum range.

The analysis and estimation of battery life directly provided by the software are good value.

I just discovered the Power Profiler Kit II from Nordic Semiconductor which is less than $ 100 with 200nA to 1A measurement range and a resolution 100nA.

In the end, I don't recommend the Battlab-one.

P | Oct. 12, 2020

// Super Useful //

Looking at previous reviews I can say the software has improved. I'm on a W10 machine, no crashes, lockups, or hanging. When I need sub 10uA reading I put a precision resistor in parallel with the load and do the arithmetic. I found one bug, see github issues, and it was fixed in a day. I have a uCurrent and a Current Ranger on my bench and the logging capabilities of the BattLab-One make it the go to device when working on low power projects. Should you call the sleep(100) or the deepSleep(100) function while waiting for the temperature sensor? That delay(100) is costing you more than you know.

Don't want to hand over your DMM7510 to the software guy, the BattLab-One is the solution. Doesn't matter how much time you spend sourcing that low Iq LDO if firmware isn't up to the task.

Jeffrey | Oct. 9, 2020

Needs Work

I hate to give a bad review. The hardware is well designed other than the 10 uA minimum for current which I knew about before buying it. 1 uA should be the target current. The PC software hasn't been working for me, i.e. locks up frequently with the exe image provided (I have to pull the USB cable and restart the program), I haven't been able to load all the python libs yet to run the latest script. It takes a long time to start, I'm thinking the code is walking though all the com ports to auto-detect, I would rather the program launch quick and have me select the port. I was hoping to at least use it to monitor (in real-time) to see the current profile (that would be worth $100) but this is not a feature of the current python script. The Digilent USB Discover with a current sense front end is what I normally use which is a great tool for current profiling (~$300). The Otti is also good also but more expensive (~$600). So the python script needs work I'm thinking of trying to update the python code. The hardware should have provided the JTAG connector since it is open source.

Response from Bluebird Labs | Oct. 9, 2020

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for the feedback. I've had another user just submit a Pull Request on Github for a similar issue with their com ports locking. i hope to have this in the next release if it checks out in testing. Have you tried not plugging in the BattLab-One, launching the software, plug in the BattLab-One then use the Refresh button to get a new com port and select it to connect ? You should see an example of this in the Quick Start Guide (also in the User Manual )

https://bluebird-labs.com/documentation-2/

Regarding JTAG, if you want to program the MSP430, the RST, Test and GND are pulled out on the MSP430 header as shown in the link below with the caption MSP430 Programming Header.

https://bluebird-labs.com/products/

For JTAG see the TI wiki here:
https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/JTAG_(MSP430)

Or you can just use a spare TI Launchpad to program the MSP430 if you have one lying about. Just connect Test to Test, RST to RST and GND to GND. No need for VCC as the MSP430 is powered already from USB. I use Code Composer from TI for the firmware development. The firmware is up on my Github site here:

https://github.com/petersdw1/Battlab-One

As always if you are having issues, please submit a support request and I'm happy to try and track down any issues.
https://bluebird-labs.com/support/

Thanks,
Doug

Jason | Sept. 18, 2020

Invaluable tool for IoT power validation

5 minutes after getting the BattLab-One I was able to uncover an unexpected power spike from a Bluetooth module in one of my projects! The software and setup is very straight forward. Looking forward to using it on other projects and verifying the fix on my Bluetooth project once I've found the bug.

$99.00