there's a time and a place for Batteries the place is the dumpster and even for
rechargeables the time is eventually I
hate them most of the batteries you buy are going to end up leeching nasty
chemicals into the environment somewhere and even if you prefer coal rolling to
tree hugging they're a massive inconvenience I mean yes yes in some
places they make sense I mean who would want to wire permanently attached to
their TV remote but what in the Sam Hill is this and where is the plug no I
reject your reality and I substitute my own but
don't get the wrong idea this is no Adam Savage level mod converting a
battery-powered device like this one to take regular wall power is both fast and
easy I don't think this is going to happen and if you don't mind taking some
shortcuts it can be shockingly inexpensive unlike sponsorships for this
channel like the one we sold to table mod elevate your RGB keyboard experience
with cable mods beautiful ABS laser keycaps featuring Unique Designs and
maximum glow learn more at the link down below this trend towards filling up our
homes with stationary objects that require regular battery Replacements is
baffling and infuriating to me because when I say regular battery Replacements
I'm being extremely generous a they tend to fail in a staggered rather than
predictable manner meaning there is basically always something in your house
waiting for you to grab a step stool and pop in a new Power Pod and these CR
whatever the craps they are are anything
but regular I mean they're mostly
similar generally kind of button shaped
in three-ish volts and lithium-based but they come in a wide variety of diameters
and thicknesses to the point where trying to predict and stock everything
you might need will make you feel like you're some kind of career procurement
officer but then you're good right once you've got them all in your little
organizer well no like any batteries
they have a finite shelf life so you can't order too many of them you should
spend that money instead on stocking up on waffle sweaters from ltdstore.com
we've got lots of different colors now to be clear I fully support the idea of
optional battery power or battery backups in the event of a power loss
this is especially important for devices like smoke detectors or emergency
lighting that must operate even in the event of a power outage or for devices
with volatile memory but if I had a battery in every stupid connected thing
in my house it wouldn't matter if they all boasted one year battery life it
would be a weekly chore to be going around and swapping out and ordering new
battery inventory even without much smart home nonsense it was getting to
that point at my old place which is why I implemented the zero batteries policy
for my new house everything from security sensors to doorbells to smoke
detectors is hardwired and it was working great until ecobee screwed me
over with the smart sensor due to a
questionable design Choice by the original owners of this house the two
bedrooms that we're about to walk through are on the same in-floor heating
zone now this could have been rectified during our renovation but it would have
basically involved ripping out the existing tubing which is embedded in
concrete by the way and running new Loops down to the basement mechanical
room yeah that wasn't gonna happen which
means that a single thermostat right here controls the heating for both of
those rooms that's not inherently a huge problem given that both rooms face the
same direction and have similar sized Windows except that the thermostat and
therefore temperature sensor is in a completely different space in the
hallway and my daughters were thoroughly unimpressed to find that the new
in-floor heat didn't activate for them at all because even though the upstairs
hallway doesn't actually have tubes
running under it heat rises and enough rows from downstairs that their
thermostat was always reporting a comfortable temperature now one way
around this is offsets ecobee and most other thermostats for that matter has a
simple interface that allows you to take the temperature of the room in your
desired spot then key in an adjustment that allows you to account for that
difference this is a great solution if your sensor happens to be right next to
a window and and you don't want the rest of the room to end up being stifling hot
but for the girls it wouldn't do me a lick of good because the in-floor
heating and the sensor are on the opposite sides of a wall I'd actually
end up with the opposite problem they'd end up with heat stroke in the middle of
winter how embarrassing thankfully there is a solution for this ecobee allows you
to pair one or multiple smart sensors to
your thermostat wirelessly to feedback data on both temperature and occupancy
ensuring that on average your room is comfortable so I picked up a two pack of
these only to find out that there is absolutely no way to power them without
batteries and wildly this wasn't even a case of me just buying the wrong version
there is no wall powered smart sensor
what the heck ecobee fortunately converting a battery powered smart
sensor to a wall powered one should only take a few minutes
there's one right here by their nature all battery powered devices will have
their power contacts easily accessible all we need to do is get the same DC
voltage that the battery was supplying to those contacts so our battery here is
a cr2477 runs at 3 volts which is pretty
typical of a button cell but not that typical of a wall power supply that's
okay though we have some options you can get your hands on three volt power
supplies or variable power supplies but
I promised that this was going to be extremely cheap if you were willing to
take some shortcuts remember and that's exactly what we're going to
be doing 5 volt low amperage USB power
supplies like this are flipping everywhere they cost just a few dollars
to buy brand new and realistically you probably have a handful of them lying
around already it is possible that your
device would actually take the 5 volt output from this just fine we talked in
more detail about how to tell if a device has a range of acceptable input
voltages in our recent video about converting old game consoles to USBC but
the smart sensor unfortunately does not it's pretty sensitive and we need to get
exactly 3.2 volts which is the nominal
voltage of these button cells into it so
here is how we're going to do it there are a number of different ways to step
down the voltage coming out of our wall board depending on your tolerance for
ratchetness our first attempt simply used resistors we did manage to get the
voltage down to about 3 volts but what we found was that once the device
actually booted up it dropped down to 1.7 or so which caused it to to not boot
up anymore so instead we're going with this mic 5504 voltage regulator which
gets us down to 3.3 volts not quite low
enough and this 1000 ohm potentiometer which is
basically a variable resistor the total cost about 40 cents to do this over
again I would probably just buy a 3 volt voltage regulator but they're less
common and we didn't have any lying around so this is the route we took the
one thing to watch out for when you're using a voltage regulator though is that
the higher power draw the device is the more heat it might kick out if you're
inputting a higher voltage than what it's expecting so it's not like a a
magic oh I have a thousand volts incoming and I need five I'll just put
one of these on here it doesn't really work like that it needs to be kind of close for wiring I'm just grabbing an
old USB A2 mini B cable that I don't
need anymore and to cleanly pass it into my device I'm just going to drill a
small hole in the existing backplate ah oh yeah
so clean love it I do not have the best wire
strippers for these tiny little wires I haven't yet these are my old janky ones
honestly a fingernail is probably better than these the black and red wires in
here should be five volt but we're just going to sanity check that real quick
here 4.95 perfect now things are about to get
extremely spicy unlike Dan who did the
proof of concept for this I do not have Helping Hands or a proper soldering
workbench or really any of the things that I need to work on this so good luck
to me soldering this to that
okay um that actually went better than I
expected all I have to do is about 10
more successful micro solders
I hate my socks I hate my flux this is
really crappy old flux but the best flux
is the flux you have if you don't like it go flex yourself
whoops did I say 40 cents I meant 80 cents
I love down for how awesome he is but I hate him for how he makes the rest of us
look if you're watching this thinking surely there must be an easier way yes
the easier way is to not use surface mount components like this that are
intended for like board manufacturing our red and black cables go into a y
splitter and directly into our potentiometer respectively it goes out
into our 3.3 volt regulator and then we just need to dial in the pot to make
sure that the voltage is going out to our ecobee smart sensor are exactly and
exactly 3.2 volts so let's just go ahead and
double check that 3.26 uh okay well we'll need to adjust
that oh boy I turned that way too much
oh okay good I might need you to hold
this steady 3.1 should be fine okay let's go
let's go obviously the stand isn't really designed to account for this
extra weight off of the back but that's okay so might have a problem we'll solve that another day
okay let's plug this bad boy in ah
yep and I guess this dresser stays that far from the wall now okay
add a new sensor blah blah blah blah blah blah sure fine oh I gotta scan the
QR code inside it if I break this wiring I will be
extremely unhappy select an ecobee device to connect to
this smart sensor
okay sure connect is it gonna work no
lights on it or anything because it's designed to run on battery for like two
years or something like that is this one of those cases where I have over
engineered the solution yeah most people probably aren't going to do this shoot I
think I have to adjust that pot again one of the troubleshooting steps is to
bring the sensor closer to your thermostat maybe that's the problem nope
okay it's basically an exactly 3.2 now I
wonder if it's dead this may have been more trouble than it was worth let's uh
let's try a different sensor real quick here one of those things where
hate every moment of it while I'm doing it but as soon as I'm done I can't wait
to do it again you know why is my hobbyist this
why are you 4.2 volts well I sincerely hope I didn't fry this
thing 3.175 okay let's try it Boop
girl's room nope hello go ahead hey you're on speaker I'm at my Wit's End
here okay it could be that it's registered to the
the ecobee here no I tried I tried
popping your thing into a different one it's at 3.200 volts exactly what you
specified I accidentally ran it at a higher voltage momentarily it was at
like 4.5 do you think I just fried it no I was doing that a lot what you could
try doing is is furlough or like increasing the voltage
down the pot until it spikes up to four and then increasing it from there to
bring it back down to 3.2 I think it has
a large bit of draw right at the start and that screws with our little Jank
system oh I think we've reached the point in this video where I can't say
that I would recommend doing this yeah hey guys Dan here I figured out
what was going wrong with Linus's ecobee one of the little tiny wires inside the
USB end actually broke and so we weren't getting the full five volts that we
needed to make it run at all Linus actually did a great job with the
impossible soldering task that I gave him I hope you can appreciate just how
absolutely tiny some of these SMD size components are I mean honestly could you
solder onto that like in your carpet that's nuts these do come in larger
versions but we didn't have any on site so I had to kind of make do with what we
had however while troubleshooting I actually did find a better solution
that's kind of you know Linus proof look at the size of this guy it's giant I
don't even have to use tweezers to hold it up far easier I've done a little test
set up here so you can kind of see how they work it's really neat we can use
three of them in series to step down the voltage to exactly what we want if we
wanted a lower voltage then we could just add more in the first section
before the diode we're getting our 5 volts that's directly right out of our
USB wall Ward and at the final position we're getting 4.3 now that's not the
three volts we need which is kind of weird because there's no current being
sucked out of the diodes the circuit kind of doesn't know what's going on and
the power supply doesn't know what's going on nothing's being drawn as soon
as we add our ecobee sensor in here on
our first section we're getting 5.1 on our second section we're getting 4.7 and
our third section we're getting 4.3 and then finally on the output we're now
hovering around 4 volts so we've stepped down like a whole volt these ecopies are
ultra low draw devices these draw like
.005 of a milliamp which is almost
nothing when we're about to pair them they're actually drawing a lot of
current they know that they're not paired and they're drawing 30 to 50
milliamps and that's kind of what we're seeing when we're dropping down to our
three volts initially every four to ten
minutes you get a little Spike of 7 million this is one of the reason Linus
was struggling so much because it's asking for wildly different amounts of
current I think this is kind of one of the weirder devices in this category to
convert to battery power I think both of us learn quite a lot on this interesting
little project and here's another little finished one I did I'm happy to be done
with this however Linus doesn't know any of this because he was trying it about a
week ago let's see how he does here's what we're going to do
we're going to unplug it
oh shoot I just melted a bunch of the
plastic housing oh it still fits thank goodness now we just need to go into
home assistant and see if we're actually getting a readout from it holy crap I
think it might be working let's take it into the room holy crap I will I will come up with a
better system for this later and we finally got a temperature update
it's about a 20 minute cycle time which I guess makes sense on a device that's
intended to run for years on a button cell but anyway the point is it's
flipping working which means I don't have to run the heat pump in the winter
anymore see you later uh uh wait yeah
work I'm so excited this worked I'm not
excited to do up another two of them without Dan's help but I am excited to
tell you about our sponsor a big thank you to vesi for sponsoring today's video
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enjoyed this video maybe go check out the one where Jake helped me hack
together this whole ecobee home assistant thing in the first place it's
pretty interesting staying actually these are this is not how these things
are intended to be used