Hacker News Reader

Comment by bittercynic | Hacker News Reader

They're making some pretty strange claims about capacity and number of cycles.

In electric RC heli circles, batteries come along once in a while claiming to use previously unknown techniques to improve the performance of existing cells and a few gullible people buy them. They never deliver on the promises.

People who make (established) battery management circuits understand very well how to care for the cells, and claiming to beat the numbers published by the battery manufacturers by a wide margin is close to announcing an "Ambient Energy" device.

[Edited to poke fun at idea, not person/company.]

View on HN

"In electric RC heli circles"

I was around when in order to fly an electric heli you needed to attach a power cord to a wall socket. I'm serious. Back when I started it was gas only (I made it up to 60 size). I remember seeing a demo at a local hobby shop where outback someone had prototyped an electric which was hovering with a 110v power cord plugged in by extension cord.

Yeah, it's obviously snake oil. If you had a technology that increased the charge-cycle lifetime of a battery by any substantial amount, you wouldn't be marketing a stupid plastic box for mactards. You'd be cashing billion-dollar checks twice a day.

if you read the article, you'd see they're working on OEM deals to get the tech into batteries across the board. The Box is just a nice consumer demo so people can get their hands on it now. Actually a pretty smart PR move.

Also, the patent: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013142964A1

That's a patent application, yes. Are you aware that the USPTO gets so many applications for perpetual motion patents that they have regulations forbidding them? Patent application does not in any way indicate feasibility.

I was just providing the application so people could evaluate the technology, not suggesting it was evidence of anything.

I believe the point was for you, with all of your infinite battery wisdom, to review the patent and possibly even use that to back up your hyperbolic "obviously snake oil" claim, but I'm not holding my breath.

The box, judging from that patent, is unlikely to benefit from what they're doing. In fact I can't see how anymobile devices would - a laptop has 6 - 9 Li-Ion cells and needs all of them to run all the time. A cellphone has exactly 1.

The patent is proposing they're going to use capacitors/inductors to do some type of pulsed battery charging/discharging while not connected to AC power. The thing is, there's no room to move on that - you're absolutely at the mercy of the quality of those cells, since you need all of them all the time when you're running on batteries.

Worse, if you have say, 3 strings of 3 like in a laptop, and you shut-off 1 string, then you're increasing your current draw from the remaining cells and losing more power to internal resistance.

If you are using it as an external battery to another device with a battery, you actually can do interesting tricks and cut all power intermittently.

You said

>if you read the article, you'd see they're working on OEM deals

I did read the article and didn't recall that, so I re-read. This is what I saw:

>It’ll take some time for Gbatteries to get its technology embedded with third-party OEMs

Good point - I came away with the inference that they are seeking to embed the tech. But as you've highlighted, they don't explicitly say that.

p.s. It appears pulse-charging lithium batteries has been around since at least 1997, judging by all these patents [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=Lithium+ion+fa...

How would you know your technology worked? Maybe a good test would be to build a plastic box for mac users.

You would know by testing it.

This company is making an extraordinary claim regarding capacity and cycle-life, and they aren't showing extraordinary proof to back it up.

I mean, they're letting you buy the damn thing, so once you purchase it, you can see if it holds up.

Yes, snake oil salesmen are usually happy to let you buy some snake oil.

I feel like YC would have enough snake oil radar to detect if this was bogus before backing them. They don't back just anyone after all.

This is a little more difficult when knowledge moves faster than product delivery. "Snake oil salesmen" did their thing because they could move from community to community and stay ahead of the news about a fraud coming through.

I have no idea if this battery thingy is all it's cracked up to be, but the group won't last that long if they don't deliver.

Pre-ordering solves that problem. The product is delivered to everybody at once, before any knowledge can spread.

...and two to four years before fraud can be detected.

The graph doesn't diverge from the "standard" lithium battery pack for 3-4 years. The buyers won't know if they are "snake oil salesmen" for a relatively long time.

Even if you do accelerated cycles on the battery, it will be a while (1 year? 2 years?) before you can say "snake oil" and it will be around two times longer before you can confirm the claim.

It isn't a halting problem, but in terms of the pace of electronics, it's close in that by the time you can confirm it isn't snake oil, it may well be irrelevant.

For what it's worth, they have a graph of a test of a 2 (!) cells at [1]. From a sample of two, it is quite extraordinary, indeed. I find it very hard to believe in the Altair->Microsoft hypothesis. Altair to microsoft was a new practice overlooked by the big guys. Lithium charging is a very concentrated area of research with lots of investment.

For comparison, I found [2] which is a test done of pulse-charging by Electrochem/ENREV and a university. This area of research has been going on for almost two decades. I've found a number of studies on the topic. [3][4][5] I don't have time to analyze them all today, but #5 looks really good at first glance.

[1] http://www.getbatterybox.com/bos.html#highexpl [2] http://www.electrochem.org/dl/ma/197/pdfs/0111.PDF [3] http://www.che.sc.edu/faculty/popov/drbnp/Ramadass/June2002.... [4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/242110481_The_effect... [5] http://kohl.chbe.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/linked_files...

To be precise, according to that link, their sample size is n = 1. Not even two.

Sad.

It turns out that even the most amazing technologies don't just automatically get you huge checks overnight. You have to build a business, starting with a first product, and grow from there.

Actually no, if this worked it would be a 30-minute meeting.

<Gbatteries> Our patented technology extends the charge-cycle life of standard lithium-ion batteries by at least 200%, and we can prove it. <Panasonic> Great, we will license that. Here's a check for five billion dollars.

Panasonic would NOT pay additional money in licensing to make less money by having their batteries last longer.

Large companies like this make sure the batteries they use aren't interchangable or standardized. They certainly don't want to make batteries that you wouldn't want to replace.

If you look at profit analysis of almost any product (like a panasonic camera), the profit margins are all in the accessories, like batteries.

Go for Apple then, custom batteries, not user-replaceable, not retailed. They'll sign you a check for $10bn instead.

Fair enough I could see Apple doing this. Although if batteries last as long as indicated here they would have to up the cost nearly twice as much per battery to keep profits steady.

Anecdotally, I see few people replacing their apple device (for an other one) because of battery life, and conversely stories of apple stores replacing batteries/devices because of battery life issues are regular.

All in all, I don't think they'd care. Their biggest business these days is phone & tablet, and battery life (and the failure thereof) is not the primary upgrade driver.

Battery life was one of the big things that OS X 10.9 touted as an improvement. Apple expended significant engineering effort in reducing energy use to squeeze more out of their current batteries[1]. On the mobile side of things, they developed the M7 co-processor to allow access to sensor data without having to wake up the CPU, and famously never supported flash, both in an apparent attempt to save battery life. They seem to me to be very interested in battery life and I think any technology that could increase it by significant margins would be something they would snap up.

The interesting question for Apple buying this is if battery life is a factor in their planned obsolescence. I'm not sure it is at this point.

> Panasonic would NOT pay additional money in licensing to make less money by having their batteries last longer.

> Large companies like this make sure the batteries they use aren't interchangable or standardized

Li-Ion cells are made in a variety of standard sizes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_sizes#Round_lithium-ion.... I happen to own a couple of individual 18650 cells, and Panasonic and a number of other companies supply these cells to battery pack manufacturers wholesale.

Battery packs for consumer electronics are another issue.

A conversation like that means there are other options:

<Gbatteries> Our patented technology extends the charge-cycle life of standard lithium-ion batteries by at least 200%, and we can prove it. <Investor> Great, we will invest, get a product to market and you can IPO in 2 years.

It's why saying "yes" to an acquisition is so hard. There are always other options.

I think you missed a few steps.

<Gbatteries founder 1> We need to patent our technology before we can talk to to anyone, otherwise they can steal our tech.

<Gbatteries founder 2> Great, let me check our startup bank account. We have... uh... $3000.

<Gbatteries founder 1> What? Filling a patent in the US and EU cost $5000 each including agent fees. Even if I use all my personal savings, how do we eat in the 6 months that it takes to get the patent approved?

<Gbatteries founder 2> ...

This is why "Patent Pending" exists. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com