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What Happened To Duracell PowerCheck?
(hackaday.com)
They checked out
What with the weird freebooting article? This ‘article’ is just a description of Alec’s video with the clickbait cranked up to ten. Gotta love a major corporation using small creators’ work for free ad revenue…
You could add the link so people don't contribute to ad revenue if you feel strongly! https://youtu.be/zsA3X40nz9w 💜
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I'm fairly sure that the image is even a screenshot from the video. Uncredited I notice.
It is, I just watched the video an hour or so ago.
edit: In fact, until I read this thread, I didn't notice the URL and thought this was a link to the video.
That’s what pissed me off the most.
This is how hackaday posts have been… for like a decade. I guess it’s somewhere between articles and link aggregator.
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I have a really distinct memory of finding a bunch of these in a friend’s house when I was a kid and every one was empty. After watching the TC video I think it’s more likely I just wasn’t pressing hard enough and had no way to know that. Anyway, I can see why they stopped making them.
Yea, you have to press till it hurts, lol
I ended up buying a couple testers from Walmart for like $5 and they've been super useful! Definitely worth having in every household
Video on technology connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsA3X40nz9w
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Did the power check work or was it snakeoil I remember trying to see it while hurting my hand.
It did, see Technology Connections' latest video on it, he explains fully how it worked. Quite clever tbh.
Although, he admits in the video to "faking" his footage of it working, by using a off-camera heat source. (His batteries were quite dead.)
But, as someone that lived through this time, they did work, as long as you pressed hard enough in the right places. It was hard to tell if the battery was dead or if you weren't pressing hard enough
Yeah I used them. It was somewhat handy.
If you watch the whole video he does it more "for real" later on, plugging the casing into a power source to simulate a battery discharging.. Plus I've had some of these PowerCheck batteries, and they were not old, it was like... 2017? So maybe they rebooted it for a short time at some point?? Anywho, if you pressed really hard it did work I think, but also I think I was doing it wrong for a long time as well lol
The video is in the article.
Oh ok my bad
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I was a kid then, but I remember that I had to push so hard my fingers hurt... I used a multimeter.
Well the pros and cons of the multimeter are addresses in the video! He uses a meter on a dead battery and it still shows a deceptively reasonable voltage when not under load. The built-in tester draws more current.
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But the video purports that normal people don’t really test batteries.
Yeah, it was a novelty that increased the price to manufacture and didn't actually add anything of value to users.
Either you put batteries in something and they worked or they didn't, and if they stopped working the next step is try different batteries whether or not the little gauge showed it had charge left.
Now if it was added to rechargeable batteries, it would be pretty useful because tou could do something with the knowledge of a battery being at 50%. But a lot of systems with rechargeable batteries have them built in and some other way to show remaining charge like a percentage on a screen.
Now if it was added to rechargeable batteries, it would be pretty useful
I think the reason we haven't seen that is that NiMH rechargeables have fairly stable voltage during discharge while alkalines don't.
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If they are not rechargeable, they don't make sense, you just use them and throw them in the used up recycle pile. And if they are rechargeable, you already have a charger that does it.
It also has to be a waste of some resource that is rare to not use up and throw away like this.
It turned out that batteries randomly lying around are always empty. Functioning batteries are still in the device it's operating or in the box it was sold in.
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It broke too many thumbs.
Just use your $200+ Fluke to check the batteries, problem solved.
This guy is great. He can make anything sound interesting.
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He used old batteries, but I actually had new Duracell batteries with this feature very recently, in 2022 or so (Germany).
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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