Here is a classic example of a startup launching an Altair Basic with the potential produce a Microsoft-like giant. Incidentally, I think this is also the first father/son team we've funded.
I think that it's not about the BatteryBox product per se, but about some technology inside which is supposed to reduce long-term capacity loss. The box itself is basically a demo to sell or license the actual tech to OEMs.
This is straight up not possible. Lithium-ion batteries degrade irreversibly as they're used - the only way to reduce capacity loss is to reduce the depth-of-discharge: add more cells, and discharge them less per cycle.
Unless they're fiddling with the actual chemistry of the cells, it's unlikely they've changed anything.
> Batteries are typically charged and discharged through a constant stream of power, which causes problems like SEI layer formation that causes the battery to degrade over time. The BatteryOS system, by contrast, takes an active role in managing what’s happening inside a Li-ion battery, which not only lengthens the life of the battery, but also gives it the ability to store 10 percent to 40 percent more power.
Obviously the proof is in the results, but that's what they're claiming.
But real batteries are obviously unaware of these sources because there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional. The data in the article suggests that these batteries would have expired years ago, so something is clearly wrong.
In fact, real world batteries can last 15 years or more. The one thing on that site that I can positively say is false is the claim that batteries degrade if discharged below 30% charge. I can say this because myself and 2 colleagues made this defect up and deliberately planted it for the guy who actually runs BatteryUniversity to find and incorporate into the site (and he did it within 2 weeks). It was about the most harmles thing we could think of, but several manufacturers did incorporate features in their products to warn of impending discharge below 30% charge (and to be fair, probably did it with the best of intentions).
Actually, most lithium-ion cells have excellent shelf lives (10% loss of charge in 8 years, and military cells still delivering full capacity after 20 years of collecting dust
Li-ion batteries are only dead after 2 years if they are abused or their charge/discharge life is used up. Properly cared for real world Li-ion batteries last for 10 years or more (in spite of Isador Buchmann's claim to the contrary).
Li-ion batteries are only dead after 2 years if they are abused or their charge/discharge life is used up. Properly cared for real world Li-ion batteries last for 10 years or more (in spite of Isador Buchmann's claim to the contrary).
Note that he explicitly confirms that Li-ion batteries have a limit on the number of charge/discharge cycles they can handle. That's precisely the problem this technology is supposed to fix.
But notice the phrase "properly cared for". Do you think the average consumer properly cares for his/her battery or even knows what "proper care" is? My girlfriend never charges her iPad until it reaches 0%.
> My girlfriend never charges her iPad until it reaches 0%.
Also notice this phrase:
there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional.
There is a distinct difference between reversing capacity loss and reducing it. Reduction is very possibly a pro-active stance, where reversal is by nature passive.
In this case, what seems to be claimed is a pro-active method of reducing future loss of capacity. There is certainly a lot of precedent for this without my going into analogies. See the intelligent battery handling on the Tesla Model S. Sure there are many cells there, but I'm thinking there are more cells in this battery box than there is in your 6 or 9-cell laptop. Perhaps not, though. :-)
I have some HyperJuice units that I made cables for. It works OK, but is definitely clunky. I think it could be done in a better way, but it can only be a hack with Apple defending the walls of their garden so militantly.
For this reason I really hope GBatteries have a license to use the connector, and that they build in some cable management similar to what's on the magsafe unit, so the cable can be coiled neatly.
My other feedback is that having a built-in AC adapter would be so very useful. Look at the HyperJuice plug [1]. It's got the AC prongs that just slide out -- no separate wall wart, and no micro-usb cable. People that have only Apple devices won't have many micro USB cables around. It would also prevent someone from plugging the USB cable into their laptop while it's being powered by the external battery. :\
HyperMac literally bought Apple adapters and chopped off the cable. I'm not sure how much more Apple-proof you can get than that. What you need to be is "lawyers on retainers who can keep draining your law funds"-proof.
edit: another comment suggest a MagSafe-MagSafe2 adapter is used. That's an interesting solution that may very well work if they require the customer to buy it themselves, as I believe the Apple patent hinges on using a magnet. Of course, they may want to argue that in court. For years and years.
Apple under Jobs might be different to Apple under Cook. Potentially they have Apple's blessing. Suppose a promising YC company was just going to make it for the newest Samsung laptop otherwise. What would you do if you were Apple? Just speculation, but that's how I imagine "Apple-proof" meaning, especially if there's some agreement that they can't announce yet.
The claimed performance would provide a huge competitive advantage. If it worked as advertised and Apple had control over it, they'd integrate the software into their products and this box would never see the light of day as a third party product.
They have something like it. As do almost all makers of modern battery-powered electronics. But no-one else is claiming essentially no loss of capacity after 3000 cycles.
Apple boasts 80% of original capacity after 1000 cycles. Which was industry leading, at least at the time of introduction. But a long way off GBatteries' claim.
And better batteries would further buoy resale price of Apple gear, which buoys their premium pricing for new goods. If they could have this, they would want it. Badly. It would also perfectly fit their MO for acquisitions: an engineering/technology acquisition that provides a competitive advantage to their core business.
Yep; I have the hypermac as well; it is very great. I buy new ones all the time. The magsafe thing is a bit (not much) of a hassle though. Curious as well how that will be handled.
I don't understand the need for snark. It's a valid point. The main selling-point of their first product is that it can power MacBooks but if Apple cracks down on them for using the MagSafe adapter then this product will no longer be useful for its intended purposes.
What makes you think this? Portable batteries like this are dime a dozen (maybe not for macs, I don't own one). Or the real play is licensing the battery tech which doesn't really seem Microsoft like at all since the company would likely fade into the background as the big battery companies use the technology.
I don't mean to be offensive, just curious why you are so confident this company or product is a industry game changer.
You need to read to the end of the post to understand PG's analogy. There is software that controls the charging rate of the battery that (if the claims are correct) could be fundamentally disruptive to batteries going forward, so the Altair analogy implies a potential software licensing strategy as an upside in this company.
But is this new technology? Have they really figured out something that other battery companies don't know?
This charger takes 2.25 hours to reach 80% or 4.5 hours to reach 100% capacity. Could it simply be that they're charging more slowly?
Maybe other battery makers know about this, but they don't implement it because they (and consumers) don't value using the battery effectively. Hoping for some lithium-charging experts (I know there are people out there with this as their primary research focus) to weigh in.
Since they filed a patent on it, I assume it is new tech. There is new charging tech from time to time, but most of the IP belongs to those big semiconductor companies, like TI. I know TI has an innovative power management module for LiPoly batteries, but it is pretty expensive.
It could be a new tech. While there are quite a few BMS chips available around, from a bunch of companies [ http://liionbms.com/html/BMS_IC_table.html ] it is possible that they did some careful research onto what charging cycles are used in these products and found charging cycles that work even better for particular battery chemistries.
On the other hand, research is tough and it is so much easier to learn about the existence of a few hot words (like BMS), file a provisional patent and smooth-talk an investor or two with 'BatteryOS platform' . Considering that they are comparing their charging cycle with the "conventional" charger and throw words like "Chevy Volt, which only charges its battery to 50 percent capacity" I'm finding this scenario as a more likely one.
Still. It is not like I wouldn't like having more well designed LiIon BMS/charger combos on the market! There aren't many available and it's always nice to have more choice! So good luck!
Looked at it a bit more, I think this story could be a good illustration of confirmation bias in research [1].
They've probably tried their best, but it is really really really easy to make a mistake when you are designing an experiment. Or post-processing your experimental data. Or plotting the results. Or doing your math.
As it was noticed in the comments below, it looks like in that particular case an outcome of an experiment was decided using insufficient (n = 1) number of samples [ http://www.getbatterybox.com/bos.html#highexpl ]. Also there is at least one mistake in the math, a 50Wh battery can not be charged from a discharged state to 80% by 5 Volt 1 Amp power source in 4.5 hours [ http://www.getbatterybox.com/index.html#faq ]. The math is wrong.
[1] As per Wikipedia article: confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.
In the paper reference to arxiv, which supposedly explains what this tech does, that is exactly what they are doing. Equation (1) shows that rate of SEI growth is proportional to charge rate (note: this equation given is actually a simplification as their rho should be proportional to how full the pack is) so you can limit SEI growth to whatever you want by just taking a charge time hit. Your users may or may not like this.
I can promise you none of this is new to anyone in the battery industry. The problem is not lack of knowledge. In general, the problem is the lack of desire to pay for a micro controller which can run the software necessary to do the math in the battery pack.
The new YC fascination (recent RFS) appears to be in solving big problems without building the big product right away. You can build an add-on that works you towards some level of driving automation well before you build an entire robotic car, for example.
PG's line there is a reinforcing hint for those that missed the Boosted Boards example previously or weren't too optimistic in response to that RFS. Hopefully it helps more people think about how they could approach big problems in an initially accessible way.
Battery storage will be absolutely huge in a few years. There is so much potential that has gone unexplored, since batteries have traditionally been heavy, low-capacity and short-lived. At least some of the people in this space who are in the right place at the right time today, are going to win big. Someone will have to build all these batteries.
Everything from cars to renewable energy to light aircraft is going to be battery-powered in the future. It will be very exciting to see what happens in this space, and I'm bummed that I'm largely unable to invest in this space myself. Best of luck to the YC-backed companies :)
(Case in point: Tesla Motors have announced that they're building the world's largest Li-ion battery factory, to the tune of $5 billion).
I think it's very unlikely that airplanes will be battery powered in the medium-term future. The chemical energy stored in hydrogen bonds is just so much denser than the electrical energy stored in concentrated lithium ions.
I know that battery-powered planes have been built, but it just seems so uneconomical to me. Do you have evidence that could persuade me otherwise?
Or perhaps am I misunderstanding? By light aircraft do you mean aircraft less than 100 pounds or something?
In short, I strongly believe that you're incorrect. (Note: I'm talking about general/recreational aviation here). dchichkov mentioned the Antares, which is a high-performance electric self-launch sailplane. In this category, there's also the Pipistrel Taurus G4. Lots of other electrically-powered light aircraft exist, and they are all held back by battery weight, volume and cost.
There is a large number of advantages to electric propulsion vs. combustion engines in aircraft: Much lower maintenance costs, simpler maintenance, higher reliability (in gliders, replacing two-stroke engines with electric motors yields a huge safety advantage), lower fuel cost, simpler operation (less possibility for human error), less noise, lower weight (ex batteries), smaller volume per unit power, higher efficiency, lower purchase cost. The only real disadvantages are low energy density and charging time/infrastructure. At some point in the medium-term future (~5 years) we will hit a point where the benefits obviously outweigh the disadvantages for many use cases. In fact, I think the inflection point has already been hit wrt. the battery tech, it's just that it isn't obvious to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the progress in battery pack cost development. Give it a couple of years.
Even this list of advantages disregards the fact that the mechanical simplicity of electric motors enable aircraft configurations that haven't been tried at scale, for instance gimballed/swerving variable-geometry ducted-fan propellers, etc. Electric motors are also not dependent on high air pressure to get enough oxygen for efficient combustion. There's just a huge new design space that opens up when you have sufficiently powerful battery storage. Super exciting.
Pay attention to the drone aircraft companies, they are the ones in a position to drive this shift.
Thanks for the detailed response! Do you think there's any chance that these electric planes will used for cargo/passengers? (Or do you think they'd mainly fit into the recreation/tourism/short-hop flights? Are there other current/future plane uses that I'm not thinking of?)
I'm agnostic in that regard. Some very smart people (notably, Elon Musk) have said that electric propulsion is the future also for passenger aircraft in the more distant future, but I have not seen any detailed reasoning or numbers to indicate how this would work.
Presumably, there would have to be huge efficiency gains over combustion jet propulsion since the energy density of batteries would in any concievable circumstance be much smaller than hydrocarbon fuels. One possibility would be to fly higher, utilizing the smaller air resistance and the fact that battery-electric propulsion does not have the oxygen limitation with altitude that combustion processes have, but I haven't seen a detailed argument regarding how plausible this is.
If we ever build a "flying car", it will have to be electric and use fixed wings in addition to propellers since this is required for generating energy-efficient lift. In the "short-hop"/low-speed/personal transport category, there will definitely be possibilities.
I'm curious to know how much work they'd done on the idea ahead of time. If this was conceived during YC, they're definitely a very impressive team.
A few months ago I looked into building this exact product. If you're a DIY kinda person and you don't mind carrying around some extra bulk, it's somewhat easy to cobble something together. If you want a light/small brick w/ self-contained charging and output regulation that just works, it's much more difficult and potentially dangerous -- especially if you want it to charge fast enough that a 1h airport layover is meaningful. Add in more advanced battery management/conditioning schemes, and I'm just all kinds of impressed.
Though, this claim does irk me a little:
> With the same battery, we could charge to a full 100 percent and it won’t degrade
> Never experience loss in capacity again. A Li-ion battery powered by BatteryOS doesn’t degrade in capacity over time, and as a result has a 4x higher cycle life than when controlled by conventional methods.
I think I need a better definition of "capacity degradation" here - if you acknowledge that there's still a charge cycle limit, I'm curious to know what happens once it's reached. Either way, I'm very sceptical of anything which claims to completely eliminate the effects of entropy.
There are 100s of ways to game this cycle spec too. For example, for all we know there is a 100WHr pack inside the box and they only make 50WHr of it available to the user. This way you can make a 50WHr battery that effectively never "degrades". The BatteryOS just manages the "reserve". Then the only thing they are really measuring is the speed at which their algorithm looses calibration. The software for many BMUs (battery management units) actually does this today.
When you purchase any NAND flash device like a USB stick or an SSD, essentially the same thing is happening. The raw storage is much higher, but due to a high raw bit error rate (see NAND displacement errors), the need for wear leveling, and the need for reserve blocks to swap into service as the device ages, the claimed capacities are reduced to accommodate MTBF and observed bit error specs.
In cases such as this I think it'd be disingenuous not to drop your claimed specs to reflect the actual usefulness of the device.
This seems bigger than Altair Basic to me. If this thing works well it's huge already. Battery time is one of the biggest problems for people working out of the office (along with decent internet and peace of mind).
