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there's a time and a place for Batteries the place is the dumpster and even for

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rechargeables the time is eventually I

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hate them most of the batteries you buy are going to end up leeching nasty

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chemicals into the environment somewhere and even if you prefer coal rolling to

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tree hugging they're a massive inconvenience I mean yes yes in some

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places they make sense I mean who would want to wire permanently attached to

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their TV remote but what in the Sam Hill is this and where is the plug no I

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reject your reality and I substitute my own but

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don't get the wrong idea this is no Adam Savage level mod converting a

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battery-powered device like this one to take regular wall power is both fast and

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easy I don't think this is going to happen and if you don't mind taking some

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shortcuts it can be shockingly inexpensive unlike sponsorships for this

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channel like the one we sold to table mod elevate your RGB keyboard experience

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with cable mods beautiful ABS laser keycaps featuring Unique Designs and

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maximum glow learn more at the link down below this trend towards filling up our

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homes with stationary objects that require regular battery Replacements is

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baffling and infuriating to me because when I say regular battery Replacements

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I'm being extremely generous a they tend to fail in a staggered rather than

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predictable manner meaning there is basically always something in your house

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waiting for you to grab a step stool and pop in a new Power Pod and these CR

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whatever the craps they are are anything

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but regular I mean they're mostly

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similar generally kind of button shaped

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in three-ish volts and lithium-based but they come in a wide variety of diameters

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and thicknesses to the point where trying to predict and stock everything

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you might need will make you feel like you're some kind of career procurement

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officer but then you're good right once you've got them all in your little

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organizer well no like any batteries

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they have a finite shelf life so you can't order too many of them you should

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spend that money instead on stocking up on waffle sweaters from ltdstore.com

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we've got lots of different colors now to be clear I fully support the idea of

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optional battery power or battery backups in the event of a power loss

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this is especially important for devices like smoke detectors or emergency

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lighting that must operate even in the event of a power outage or for devices

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with volatile memory but if I had a battery in every stupid connected thing

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in my house it wouldn't matter if they all boasted one year battery life it

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would be a weekly chore to be going around and swapping out and ordering new

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battery inventory even without much smart home nonsense it was getting to

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that point at my old place which is why I implemented the zero batteries policy

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for my new house everything from security sensors to doorbells to smoke

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detectors is hardwired and it was working great until ecobee screwed me

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over with the smart sensor due to a

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questionable design Choice by the original owners of this house the two

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bedrooms that we're about to walk through are on the same in-floor heating

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zone now this could have been rectified during our renovation but it would have

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basically involved ripping out the existing tubing which is embedded in

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concrete by the way and running new Loops down to the basement mechanical

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room yeah that wasn't gonna happen which

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means that a single thermostat right here controls the heating for both of

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those rooms that's not inherently a huge problem given that both rooms face the

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same direction and have similar sized Windows except that the thermostat and

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therefore temperature sensor is in a completely different space in the

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hallway and my daughters were thoroughly unimpressed to find that the new

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in-floor heat didn't activate for them at all because even though the upstairs

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hallway doesn't actually have tubes

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running under it heat rises and enough rows from downstairs that their

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thermostat was always reporting a comfortable temperature now one way

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around this is offsets ecobee and most other thermostats for that matter has a

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simple interface that allows you to take the temperature of the room in your

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desired spot then key in an adjustment that allows you to account for that

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difference this is a great solution if your sensor happens to be right next to

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a window and and you don't want the rest of the room to end up being stifling hot

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but for the girls it wouldn't do me a lick of good because the in-floor

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heating and the sensor are on the opposite sides of a wall I'd actually

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end up with the opposite problem they'd end up with heat stroke in the middle of

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winter how embarrassing thankfully there is a solution for this ecobee allows you

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to pair one or multiple smart sensors to

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your thermostat wirelessly to feedback data on both temperature and occupancy

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ensuring that on average your room is comfortable so I picked up a two pack of

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these only to find out that there is absolutely no way to power them without

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batteries and wildly this wasn't even a case of me just buying the wrong version

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there is no wall powered smart sensor

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what the heck ecobee fortunately converting a battery powered smart

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sensor to a wall powered one should only take a few minutes

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there's one right here by their nature all battery powered devices will have

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their power contacts easily accessible all we need to do is get the same DC

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voltage that the battery was supplying to those contacts so our battery here is

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a cr2477 runs at 3 volts which is pretty

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typical of a button cell but not that typical of a wall power supply that's

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okay though we have some options you can get your hands on three volt power

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supplies or variable power supplies but

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I promised that this was going to be extremely cheap if you were willing to

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take some shortcuts remember and that's exactly what we're going to

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be doing 5 volt low amperage USB power

85
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supplies like this are flipping everywhere they cost just a few dollars

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to buy brand new and realistically you probably have a handful of them lying

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around already it is possible that your

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device would actually take the 5 volt output from this just fine we talked in

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more detail about how to tell if a device has a range of acceptable input

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voltages in our recent video about converting old game consoles to USBC but

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the smart sensor unfortunately does not it's pretty sensitive and we need to get

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exactly 3.2 volts which is the nominal

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voltage of these button cells into it so

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here is how we're going to do it there are a number of different ways to step

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down the voltage coming out of our wall board depending on your tolerance for

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ratchetness our first attempt simply used resistors we did manage to get the

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voltage down to about 3 volts but what we found was that once the device

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actually booted up it dropped down to 1.7 or so which caused it to to not boot

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up anymore so instead we're going with this mic 5504 voltage regulator which

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gets us down to 3.3 volts not quite low

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enough and this 1000 ohm potentiometer which is

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basically a variable resistor the total cost about 40 cents to do this over

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again I would probably just buy a 3 volt voltage regulator but they're less

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common and we didn't have any lying around so this is the route we took the

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one thing to watch out for when you're using a voltage regulator though is that

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the higher power draw the device is the more heat it might kick out if you're

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inputting a higher voltage than what it's expecting so it's not like a a

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magic oh I have a thousand volts incoming and I need five I'll just put

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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

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old USB A2 mini B cable that I don't

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need anymore and to cleanly pass it into my device I'm just going to drill a

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small hole in the existing backplate ah oh yeah

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so clean love it I do not have the best wire

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strippers for these tiny little wires I haven't yet these are my old janky ones

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honestly a fingernail is probably better than these the black and red wires in

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here should be five volt but we're just going to sanity check that real quick

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here 4.95 perfect now things are about to get

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extremely spicy unlike Dan who did the

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proof of concept for this I do not have Helping Hands or a proper soldering

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workbench or really any of the things that I need to work on this so good luck

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to me soldering this to that

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okay um that actually went better than I

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expected all I have to do is about 10

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more successful micro solders

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I hate my socks I hate my flux this is

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really crappy old flux but the best flux

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is the flux you have if you don't like it go flex yourself

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whoops did I say 40 cents I meant 80 cents

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I love down for how awesome he is but I hate him for how he makes the rest of us

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look if you're watching this thinking surely there must be an easier way yes

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the easier way is to not use surface mount components like this that are

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intended for like board manufacturing our red and black cables go into a y

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splitter and directly into our potentiometer respectively it goes out

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into our 3.3 volt regulator and then we just need to dial in the pot to make

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sure that the voltage is going out to our ecobee smart sensor are exactly and

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exactly 3.2 volts so let's just go ahead and

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double check that 3.26 uh okay well we'll need to adjust

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that oh boy I turned that way too much

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oh okay good I might need you to hold

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this steady 3.1 should be fine okay let's go

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let's go obviously the stand isn't really designed to account for this

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extra weight off of the back but that's okay so might have a problem we'll solve that another day

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okay let's plug this bad boy in ah

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yep and I guess this dresser stays that far from the wall now okay

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add a new sensor blah blah blah blah blah blah sure fine oh I gotta scan the

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QR code inside it if I break this wiring I will be

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extremely unhappy select an ecobee device to connect to

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this smart sensor

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okay sure connect is it gonna work no

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lights on it or anything because it's designed to run on battery for like two

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years or something like that is this one of those cases where I have over

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engineered the solution yeah most people probably aren't going to do this shoot I

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think I have to adjust that pot again one of the troubleshooting steps is to

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bring the sensor closer to your thermostat maybe that's the problem nope

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okay it's basically an exactly 3.2 now I

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wonder if it's dead this may have been more trouble than it was worth let's uh

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let's try a different sensor real quick here one of those things where

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hate every moment of it while I'm doing it but as soon as I'm done I can't wait

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to do it again you know why is my hobbyist this

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why are you 4.2 volts well I sincerely hope I didn't fry this

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thing 3.175 okay let's try it Boop

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girl's room nope hello go ahead hey you're on speaker I'm at my Wit's End

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here okay it could be that it's registered to the

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the ecobee here no I tried I tried

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popping your thing into a different one it's at 3.200 volts exactly what you

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specified I accidentally ran it at a higher voltage momentarily it was at

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like 4.5 do you think I just fried it no I was doing that a lot what you could

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try doing is is furlough or like increasing the voltage

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down the pot until it spikes up to four and then increasing it from there to

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bring it back down to 3.2 I think it has

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a large bit of draw right at the start and that screws with our little Jank

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system oh I think we've reached the point in this video where I can't say

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that I would recommend doing this yeah hey guys Dan here I figured out

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what was going wrong with Linus's ecobee one of the little tiny wires inside the

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USB end actually broke and so we weren't getting the full five volts that we

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needed to make it run at all Linus actually did a great job with the

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impossible soldering task that I gave him I hope you can appreciate just how

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absolutely tiny some of these SMD size components are I mean honestly could you

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solder onto that like in your carpet that's nuts these do come in larger

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versions but we didn't have any on site so I had to kind of make do with what we

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had however while troubleshooting I actually did find a better solution

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that's kind of you know Linus proof look at the size of this guy it's giant I

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don't even have to use tweezers to hold it up far easier I've done a little test

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set up here so you can kind of see how they work it's really neat we can use

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three of them in series to step down the voltage to exactly what we want if we

186
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wanted a lower voltage then we could just add more in the first section

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before the diode we're getting our 5 volts that's directly right out of our

188
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USB wall Ward and at the final position we're getting 4.3 now that's not the

189
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three volts we need which is kind of weird because there's no current being

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sucked out of the diodes the circuit kind of doesn't know what's going on and

191
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the power supply doesn't know what's going on nothing's being drawn as soon

192
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as we add our ecobee sensor in here on

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our first section we're getting 5.1 on our second section we're getting 4.7 and

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our third section we're getting 4.3 and then finally on the output we're now

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hovering around 4 volts so we've stepped down like a whole volt these ecopies are

196
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ultra low draw devices these draw like

197
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.005 of a milliamp which is almost

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nothing when we're about to pair them they're actually drawing a lot of

199
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current they know that they're not paired and they're drawing 30 to 50

200
00:13:59,040 --> 00:14:05,100
milliamps and that's kind of what we're seeing when we're dropping down to our

201
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three volts initially every four to ten

202
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minutes you get a little Spike of 7 million this is one of the reason Linus

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was struggling so much because it's asking for wildly different amounts of

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current I think this is kind of one of the weirder devices in this category to

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convert to battery power I think both of us learn quite a lot on this interesting

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little project and here's another little finished one I did I'm happy to be done

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with this however Linus doesn't know any of this because he was trying it about a

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week ago let's see how he does here's what we're going to do

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we're going to unplug it

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oh shoot I just melted a bunch of the

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plastic housing oh it still fits thank goodness now we just need to go into

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home assistant and see if we're actually getting a readout from it holy crap I

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think it might be working let's take it into the room holy crap I will I will come up with a

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better system for this later and we finally got a temperature update

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it's about a 20 minute cycle time which I guess makes sense on a device that's

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intended to run for years on a button cell but anyway the point is it's

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flipping working which means I don't have to run the heat pump in the winter

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anymore see you later uh uh wait yeah

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work I'm so excited this worked I'm not

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excited to do up another two of them without Dan's help but I am excited to

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tell you about our sponsor a big thank you to vesi for sponsoring today's video

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wet socks see even hearing the words makes you

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cringe don't worry vessey's on the case fessy Footwear claims that their dymatex

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technology makes their shoes a hundred percent waterproof and keeps your feet

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cool in the summer and warm in the winter and their new storm burst shoes

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combine the comfort of a sneaker with the grip and coverage of an outdoor boot

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vesi has added extra layering for added warmth as well as extra grip to prevent

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you from slipping and sliding in unfavorable weather conditions unless

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you want to even then it'll be hard most boots are hard to put on and take off

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not the storm bursts take them off and put them on with ease thanks to the

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handy pull tabs the storm bursts are feature packed and will make great gifts

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with the unpredictable Spring weather coming up so check out the vessi storm

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burst and other styles at vessi.com Linus Tech tips and use code LTT for 15

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off your entire order that's a pretty this is part of the deal if you guys

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enjoyed this video maybe go check out the one where Jake helped me hack

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together this whole ecobee home assistant thing in the first place it's

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pretty interesting staying actually these are this is not how these things

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are intended to be used