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Bluebird Labs

149 orders since Jun 25, 2020

6 Reviews

Hopkins, MN, United States of America

Ships from United States of America.

Bluebird Labs Doug Peters

Custom Work Available

BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

Bluebird Labs

$99.00

BattLab-One (no enclosure)

BattLab-One (no enclosure)

Bluebird Labs

$79.00

About

Welcome to Bluebird Labs. As a designer of embedded battery powered devices, I often find myself in need of tools that would enable me to build better products more efficiently. Unfortunately the tools I need are often too expensive – so I ended up creating Bluebird Labs to develop tools that are within the reach of the everyday engineer/designer/tinkerer. Bluebird Labs is entirely open source and I encourage you to take what I’ve built and improve upon it. I hope that you will find my products to be helpful and useful in your designs!

Doug Peters is the Founder of Bluebird Labs, LLC in Hopkins, MN. He has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, MA and an M.S. certificate in Applied Statistics, from Penn State University. He worked for 10 years at GE in Telematics and worked at NeXT computer as a systems engineer many, many years ago. You can reach him at dpeters@bluebird-labs.com.

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Review Breakdown

5
2 4
3 3
1 2
0 1
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Average Ratings

Product: (3.83)

Documentation: (4.33)

Shipping: (4.83)

Communication: (4.83)

Christopher | April 12, 2021

Useful tool

For BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

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

For BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

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.

Allen | Dec. 12, 2020

Outstanding product, well designed, and great price!

For BattLab-One (no enclosure)

If you're reading this you probably know what this thing does so I'll skip that part and just say it does the thing it does pretty damn well at a really nice price. I had a question about the software, posted an issue on GitHub, and had a response within minutes. This is a great product backed up with amazing support.

P | Oct. 12, 2020

// Super Useful //

For BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

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

For BattLab-One Battery Life Optimizer

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.
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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

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