DeWalt Batteries, Real and unreal

I had researched a little online, enough to be marginally dangerous, and had sourced what appears to be a bargain pairing of replacement batteries for my DeWalt drills. I'll say right up front, buying replacements that are not manufactured by the OEM is always going to be a risk and potentially a waste of money, short term or long term. However, to "do science" on a very small sample, for the heck of it, I spent a small amount of money and will review what I received, remember, what I receive may not be at all what others are presented with, as they say "your results may vary" and that is the truth when navigating the online marketplace/minefield of foreign stuff/crap.

Left to right, (a) new 12v DeWalt 2Ah, (b) used DeWalt 1.5Ah and then (c) the replacement battery, which is touted to be "upgraded" 4Ah - a figure I highly doubt and will attempt to calculate based on the cell type within. The DeWalts use (a) Korean cells and assembly in Mexico, (b) Japanese cells with additional processing in China and the replacement is assumed to be 100% China. I'm not reviewing or benchmarking all of the battery packs, there is far too much of that going on online, I am just going to report on the cheap one, and by golly it was cheap, from Amazon two of the batteries were $22.40 delivered to my door, that is a mere $11.20 each compared to $48.60 for the genuine 2Ah units. (Canadian Dollars)

The build quality is reasonable, apart from the soldering, the cells appear to be clean and new but could be recycled, overall for the price I am sort of impressed, and if the assembly will fail, it will be the soldering, or the questionable circuit board. The cells are PROS18650 3.6V with a code of 22G2015Y15 so I will see if I can find out exactly what that means. I am going to assume that finding out what those identifying numbers mean will be somewhat of a rabbit hole, so I'll end part one of the review at this stage, sort of a cliffhanger...

Well, not so much as it took less than five minutes to find the datasheet on similar cells and the reported "facts" being that they are Li-ion and the individual cells are probably 2150mAh which means, as they are in series, that the capacity of the complete battery pack, if new, is approximately 2.15Ah. but there is also some information out there that these particular batteries could be other capacities, which was completely expected for mysterious Chinese products.

The 18650 number is 18mm diameter, 65mm long and circular shape. The second code, 22G2015Y15 is the enigma, I will check....

An educated guess is that capacity is 2.2Ah which is first two digits, then manufactured date is 2015 and week 15. In this research the internet was not at all useful, although it appears that the PROS relates to Henan Prospower Technologies. I have put an enquiry into their website, we will see if anything of interest comes back.

Time passes...

I have no test equipment, besides multimeters and the like, so I did a "real world" test during the ongoing reinforcement of my old garden fence over the past week and have used one of these mysterious battery packs from a full charge, screwed a total of 186 wood screws, 1-1/2" long with at least enough juice to get to the 190 mark. I did not wish to drain the battery to zero, so finished while I was ahead.

I would say that represents a good return on a single charge. I subsequently charged the battery using the DeWalt fast charger and it took about 30 minutes, so that supports the idea that the mysterious battery pack is about two amp-hour, not the imagined four that the original listing reported.

Rampant Consumerism

I suppose this can be included in this blog because it floods my brain at the moment and perhaps I will explain how this suddenly happened : 

A panel on our fence blew down and we fixed it, during that process I realized that my cordless drill, a Black and Decker, purchased back in 2008, needed a second battery, because it was very clear that other parts of the fence needed reinforcing or improving, just to keep away the inevitable day when the whole thing would be replaced.

That sounds straight forward, buy a second battery and get on with it, yet things are never that simple in the cordless tool environment, because sixteen years had passed and of course, the smart people at Black and Decker have no desire for consumers to keep their old battery operated tools, they want them to buy new battery operated tools.

I sold the B&D for $40 on marketplace and after some research, bought a DeWalt kit with two batteries and charger, I must admit the little drill you see in the centre of the photo, the brushless DCD701, is quite an impressive little unit. The bag, two batteries, charger and drill came to $135 so with my B&D discount I was $95 out of pocket.

I hear you say, but OTG, there appear to be other things in the photo, other DeWalt things, and I will commend you on your observational skills, for a week or so after the initial purchase, I was intrigued by the comments online about impact drivers and found on marketplace a chap selling a set including an impact driver, so we can add another $80 to the expenditure, now I'm up to $175

I have plans though, I will attempt to recoup some of that back by selling the brushed drill with used battery and the additional charger on marketplace. I would say watch this space but that's probably the last anyone will hear of this story.

Absolute Garbage, PNY Flash drive

This is not a new acquisition, it has been in my backup box for a while, I suppose I bought it a few years back for a "bargain" price and because of that, thought nothing of varying from my normal brands of trusted flash drives. It has been trouble, it always needs repairing when inserted and therefore it is not a wise choice for a backup device, so I decided to fix it....

It didn't take long with my precision instruments....

Just a photo of the board before I fixed it even further...

The conclusion is a simple one, always make two backups and only buy Kingston, Sandisk or Samsung flash drives, prices are excellent anyways without resorting to the brands that are in the other leagues and as a final warning, be extremely wary of the no name brands that seem to proliferate the online merchants, if it seems too good to be true, it will be and the only thing that will result will be sad faces.

The cost of gigglybytes Nowadays.

Around this time in 2004 there was great excitement in life, well, when I say great, it was during my working life so most things of distraction were marginally exciting, and usually, anything acquisitional to do with technology would float my boat.

There was a need to transport files from work, personal files not work files, and Kingston Technology brought out their 1GB Datatraveller Elite. That was ONE gigglybyte, it was HUGE and in the Futureshop flyer they had a screaming deal, C$99.99 with a C$30 mail in rebate which I am sure you older readers will remember, buy something, send in the proof of purchase and the rebate form, wait patiently and it would eventually arrive long after you had forgotten about it.

There it still is, nineteen years later, on the right complete with free lanyard and Canadian Tire fishing lure doobery to stop me from losing the top.

To the left of it, you will see my purchase this weekend, Black Friday or whatever they want to call it, Staples brick and mortar store near Victoria, C$9.99 each....

Ignoring taxes, the gigglybyte comparison is rather impressive, it was, nineteen years ago, C$69.99 for a single gigglybyte and here and now, C$0.078 or 7.8 cents, which is a lot less, 896 times less. 

This is a handy statistic to hold in your head for the next time someone mentions down at the brewery how much beer was twenty years ago, or how cheap shoes, tee-shirts or hoodies used to be, it is true, things used to be bigger when we were kids, take Wagon Wheels as an example, they're positively tiny nowadays compared to what they were back when my hands were half the size.

Ok, I don't know what my point was now, I just want a Wagon Wheel. 

Inevitable progess?

 

Presenting an ACER Nitro 5 Intel i5-8300H with Nvida GTX 1050 Ti. The first computer in this house to be running Windows 11, version 23H2 and unfortunately this "progress" is inevitable because of the imminent demise of Windows 10 as I will attempt to explain.

I have been thinking for a year or more about my next steps for my daily computer, I have always run a laptop for most of my needs, and I have a separate, more powerful computer for gaming.  It is an unfortunate fact that Microsoft is once again murdering their baby on the 14th October, 2025 and replacing it with an intrusive, highly controlling, operating system that has strict hardware requirements. That being said, they are replacing an already intrusive operating system with something more intrusive and restrictive and it is a fact that Windows 11 will not work on processors older that eighth generation and computers without a specific generation of TPM module.

We reluctantly moved from Windows 7 and grumbled, and it is merely history repeating itself now, and there are rumours of Windows 12 being released before the demise of Windows 10, a sort of reflection that every other release is a good one, a bit like Star Trek movies, although that paradigm has been broken with the last few movies being pathetic and cartoonish. I have heard bad rumours about Windows 11 but it only seems fair that I should try it for myself.

I don't mind improved hardware, but I do mind Microsoft forcing me into it when I can get by with perfectly adequate older stuff, so in the meantime...

Step one has been going on for almost a year now, I set up a Linux OS computer for appraisal as a "daily driver" trying one version and then taking advice and settling on another. It was noticed during the year that the little NUC computer we have attached to the TV for streaming was being bogged down by the various "secret" windows updates in the background, so about a month ago, let us call it step two, I created an identical NUC but with Linux installed. These two machines have been ticking along nicely, doing what is expected, they wait patiently when updates are available for user permission and there are no windows shenanigans...

Step three to improve things took place this week. I run Windows 10 Pro on a Lenovo T530 laptop, specifically that model as I like it with the backlit keyboard and if we look at the age of it, well the processor is from 2012 and an i5-3320M, Intel Ivy Bridge and over the last few months Windows has slowed, as it does so it needs a total refresh. In terms of Microsoft's plans and industry opinion, this laptop is obsolete, yet it is, in my humble opinion, perfect for everything I need in a daily driver. I bought another from a chap in Victoria last week on eBay for the total cost of $65 and I have set up a fresh Windows 10 installation without compromising my existing machine, it is now fully functional, a clone of my older T530.

Step one, two, three all entailed a machine that will not officially run Windows 11 and I need to plan for October 2025, which will arrive quicker than expected, due to the odd nature of forward time travel in retirement. The Acer Nitro, being fully compliant with all Microsoft requirements for Windows 11 is a stepping stone, an educational computer to dovetail me into their new ways. 

The question is, will it be adequate for Windows 12 when it inevitably arrives?

A Thirty-Eight Year Arc

In early 1985 I was sent to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California to represent the Uk based APPH Stress Office for development of the US Navy Hawk Derivative, the T45TS, a jet trainer aircraft based on the BAe Hawk T.1 and my  responsibility was structural integrity of the main landing gear. That is just the background to the 38 year story arc I am about to tell, the story is a minutia from my life, but it reflects how our brains store it all, well, most of it anyways.

Hewlett Packard had brought out a couple of programmable scientific calculators in the previous years and several in the American design office had either the HP-11C or the HP-15C and the more affordable of the two, at seventy-five US dollars, was the HP-11C. In those days Hewlett Packard sold their calculators by mail order, or through specialist shops, and the one shop I frequently "window shopped" at was a camera store in a mall near to the McDonnell Douglas facility.

I was twenty-seven, I had some extra cash in my pocket and I went into this camera store, with full intention to buy the HP-11C Calculator, but instead was distracted by the latest Minolta Freedom camera which I eventually bought, focus free, auto flash and for small format 35mm cameras it was the cats ass as they say. I took a lot of good photos with that camera in the short time I had it, one day, while out with the other adventurers somewhere in Southern California, I put it down on a wall while I had a sandwich, forgot about it and walked away. I often wonder what images I lost at that moment, in the subsequent thirty-eight years it wouldn't be the last camera that went missing.

So, the Hewlett Packard was forgotten about and when back in the UK a month later I bought a TI-66 Programmable calculator, again landscape format, same capability as the HP-11C but input was algebraic, not RPN. I held onto that calculator for almost a year, but subsequently, it was lost through no fault of my own when my Mark V Cortina was stolen from a Liverpool car park outside an MFI furniture store. I had gone in after work to look for a coffee table, good job I did not buy one because when I came out, the car, and my briefcase containing the TI-66, were gone.

A week or so later, I received a phone call at work, someone had found the briefcase on the shoreline, my paperwork and reference books were still in it, but the calculator long gone, I picked the case up and did not give the guy anything, mainly as I suspected he was probably linked to the bastards who had stolen the car, perhaps I was wrong about him and he was just a good samaritan in the right place at the right time, cynically I suspect he was just attempting to steal another quid out of my pocket.

So, I could carry on for the other thirty-seven years, but to end it here, the arc is complete as in the last month I have bought myself the HP-11C calculator and the owner's handbook. The total cost for the pair works out at a cash deal with a local seller of $50 for the calculator and via eBay, a price of $38.73 for the book, making a grand total of $88.73 which is in good old Canadian dollars, about sixty-four of those US dollars, so in reality It looks like I saved myself eleven bucks by waiting, however, looking on eBay for the box, if I ever want one, it looks like I will certainly blow the budget....

Waveform generator Kit build

The Bitscope has a wave generator built in, but I felt that, as part of my soldering apprenticeship, I should build a kit that would add to the understanding of an oscilloscope, so I had ordered a five dollar XR2206 based waveform generator kit which arrived last week and we will travel through the gauntlet of welding it together. This is basically what you receive in one of these kits, components, main board, case and difficult to read instructions :

The components, along with an acrylic case to hold the item. What is not shown in the photo is the missing fifth non-polarised capacitor which I later found stuck up on of the knobs. Twenty-eight components and a case. There would be over seventy soldered joints to be done and I was surprised how my skills have improved over the last few kits.

In true Blue Peter fashion, here is one I made earlier:

I mean ok, some things were not perfectly aligned, but that is the nature of these fiddly little kits, they are large enough to be completed, yet small enough to be difficult and frustrating. However, a pat on my back for completing this with my sausage fingers and increasingly dodgy eyeballs.

The case almost made me lose it, perhaps I was approaching the end of my patience after soldering everything, but the case components needed to be stripped of their protective paper, and then the uncooperative puzzle needed to be assembled. It was indeed a wriggly little thing and some of my slightly off tolerance soldering of the bits came back to haunt me. 

The input was supposed to be 12V but to test I used a 5V supply, but that was enough to prove that the new gizmo worked. I tested later with the correct voltage and the output was definitely better. The kit was completed in about an hour and a half, it would heve been quicker if I had found the missing capacitor before I started, it would have been less frustrating if I had more accuracy in soldering a couple of the larger items, the power input and the potentiometers which had a direct effect on assembling the case, but it was done, and I was happy.

It has been a good week, the eureka moment with the Bitscope and the success in the waveform kit.