Omnicharge

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The Omnicharge is the second “mains supply” battery backup that I have backed on kickstarter what seems years ago, and the second one to turn on in the last month

Heralded as far more advanced and adaptable compared to its competitors such as the ChargeTech Plug but it has a far lower output wattage (100Watt), so will it still be any use to me with my monster laptops?

⇑ The Omnicharge comes in a very nice compact box, minimal packing that survived the air trip perfectly.

The Omnicharge accessories match the amazing build quality of the main unit, with the adaptor tip being of especially high quality for some reason (not that im complaining)




One thing that bit me slightly is that if you are outside of the US you can’t order the accessories afterward so if you were dumb like me and did not order the DC cable or looked at the dirt magnet that is the case with its raised power button and realised a case is a mandatory requirement then poot to you.

When the Omnicharge arrived, I did not have a 90Watt power supply at hand, so I plugged my 130Watt in to see how it handled the extra load expecting a polite cut off message, but NOOOO, everything just worked, I glared at the info screen to see what was going on to discover that the giant power adaptor was ACTUALLY only drawing about 39Watts, let’s hear it for modern adaptive power supplies, this means I can use my P50 with the Omnicharge and my normal charger, sweet!!!, after a bit of experimentation, I found could make the Omnicharge peek at about 81 Watts (4 VM’s running, with me working in 1 of them) this is perfectly usable, I suppose I could have popped the limit if I have done something like video encoding, but that is not the goal.

⇓ The part of the Omincharge that sets it apart is that it will accept a very very wide range on its input charge, from USB solar panels up to monster power supplies (4.5V to 36V), if this circuit and it matching detailed control screen was built into actual laptops it would be a HUGE game changer but I will take it in any form at the moment.




⇓ The Omnicharge is only 20.4K mAh, about the size of my laptop battery, meaning it would only add about 2 hours to my battery life, then I had a realisation that I could charge the Omnicharge with the big Anka USB battery I normally carry at the same time it is providing power to the laptop, which should mean it should charge my laptop about 40% longer than it should on its own (on average my laptop takes about 40 Watts).




⇓ As you can see it works, but as you can also see the temp is rather on the high side, indeed its only 3 degrees short of the cut off temp with its little fan going for all its worth

conclusion The Omnicharge is truly a very smart bit of kit, by far the cleverest battery I have ever owned, again if a laptop provider incorporated this tech into their laptops it would be a massive game changer, but for the time being it is an essential bit of kit… just don’t forget to buy your accessories…

Cold Brewed Coffee

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I must first apologise for the lack of technical blogs recently, but real life has interesting bits in it at the moment.

As I mentioned earlier this year, life has been utter chaos and I have been drinking more and more caffeinated soft drinks. When I started seeing a litre’s-worth of cans on my desk each day, I decided it might not be as healthy as I might like — and it was costing a fortune too, so cold coffee it is!! I have tried cold coffee before and it tastes… well like coffee you have made then put in fridge. It has a nasty bitter aftertaste: perhaps I was just making it wrong?

Turns out there is this thing called “cold-brewed coffee.” I’ve had seen it online obviously, and it’s typically made in £40+ Kickstarter coffee pots then served in handcrafted mason jars… Meh. I dismissed as an over-priced fad.

Thankfully it turns out that large parts of the world have been making it for ages, and I could get a Japanese single litre glass pot that fits in the fridge door for a far more sane £17.

It turns out that pre-ground coffee is not suitable, after a period of suspicion I discovered that this is indeed correct: you get a lot of grit at the bottom of the pot with pre-ground coffee, <sigh> so how much is a fecking coffee grinder? Well about £9.50, and approximately 10 minutes of one’s time to prep. enough coffee for the week. That is bearable (ohh and un-ground coffee is a bit cheaper that ground, on a brand-by-brand basis). Sold!

You are supposed to use filtered water AS WELL (this is starting to sound like stone soup). Well, I drink London water so I can see their point there,. “But I’m not buying a water filter!” says I… Hang on, didn’t we get one when they had one of those “buy one cartridge get 10 free + plus the jug” deals a while back? <rummages in a back cupboard> Bingo! OK, we have filtered water. For more filters, Robert Dyas always has sales on.

Let’s finally make the stuff. It seems you use 80 grams of rough ground coffee for a litre (8 normal coffee spoons), pouring the water slowly over the coffee in a spiral just like with a normal filter coffee. Give it a good stir and pop it in the fridge for at least eight hours before attempting to drink (I have found a simple 24 hours works best). I wash out the filter and make the next batch as I put today’s in the thermos.

I normally have my coffee with lots of sugar and milk but found I did not need the milk at all as the coffee is far less bitter. The sugar on the other hand was a small pain as it obviously does not dissolve well in cold coffee, so I now make a batch of sugar syrup and keep it in the fridge with the coffee. I make the syrup like so:

Sugar syrup

  1. Put 1 cup of water in a pan.
  2. Add 1 cup of sugar
  3. Bring to boil while stirring until all the sugar has dissolved (it will go clear).
  4. Take straight off the stove as soon as it boils, cool it then bung it in the fridge.

Apparently sugar syrup lasts up to a month in the fridge so there is no worry there.

How does it all taste after this faff? It tastes really, really good — clean and fresh and just what I wanted as a replacement to an energy soda. Obviously you need to use a thermos to keep it cool. I use Chillys water bottles which work perfectly. Whilst I was initially worried about the coffee tainting the water bottle so I would no longer be able to use it for normal water, turns out the cold coffee doesn’t seem to do that as much as hot coffee. Even if there was some taint, a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda filled up with water overnight seems to remove any remaining taste.

Total costs:

Equipment

Coffee filter: £17

Coffee Grinder: £9

Water Filter Jug: £20 (I already had one)

Thermos or Chillys water bottle: £20 (I already had one)

total: £56

Running Costs

Coffee: A 1kg pack of good coffee beans costs about £13, 1 litre of coffee takes 80g, so a week is about a fiver.

Water Filters: £36 for 12 months (according to Robert Dyas) so a week is less than a pound.

Sugar: I go through 2 cups of sugar a week, i.e. 400 grams, so about 25 pence

total per week: £6.41 (let’s say £6.50 with a bit for electricity and water)

Conclusion Energy drinks were costing me £4 – £5 per day, so we are onto a winner after about 3.5 weeks. Nice!

An added benefit, that appeared later, is that too many soft drinks were making me cough! I had a nagging and persistent cough for about 6 months, and just thought it was a left-over from a chest infection, and that I would deal with it when I had time. Turns out a week after I moved to cold-brewed coffee it just packed in. When I switched back to soft drinks for a few days it returned. Well OK then: coffee is here to stay.

Engage 2017 From A Distance

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Watching Engage from a distance a few weeks ago was an exercise in misery, far more than even IBM Connect, Theo Heselmans had put on an extra special show and I was gutted to be missing it.

The conference looked like its exceptional mix of excellent content plus good socializing and in my personal opinion is the best of the ICS related conferences.

An extra wince for me this year is letting Theo down on the presentation of my session, thankfully Matt White stepped in and gave my session for me so a huge apology and much gratitude to him

 

Engage is always important to LDC Via as is our anniversary time, this time everybody else had to pick up the slack (Ben had to do the speed sponsoring I normally do) so I am in the team dog house.

I was sent freebies back from the various vendors, but freebie of the conference goes to Teamstudio with their Tile which according to my wife will save me about 15 years of my life

That’s it just a Slide Deck Post and a groveling apology

 

P.S. Many thanks to Amanda Bauman IBMs token sane person, for sending over some IBM swag (which I had completely failed to order) as well as the Champion Connect Tshirt

ChargeTech Plug

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects seem to fail rather a lot, but I have long wanted a battery I could charge a monster laptop from and so I could not resist the ChargeTech as they promised a 250 Watt output, which would handle the 130-170 Watt power supplies that nearly all my laptops have. after the delays that are now run of the mill with the outsourced production that is common on Kickstarter projects, they did actually deliver, my wonderful monster battery came in a very smart box and inside the battery in all its glory but with a huge yellow label on it{{This worried me for a second but it just turned out to be a REALLY pushy registration card….. so frankly it can get stuffed…}}

The Plug its self has the size and feel of an extremely bottom heavy hardback book, it has a quality feel about it.



The business end of the Plug, I have used a lot of these universal sockets, they often feel fragile and like they are going the break if I push the plug in hard, these, however, feel just perfect. the blue LEDs on the USB are a tad on the bright side, there is also a usb-c and a barrel charge port on the left-hand side.

The accessories you get are basic but expected, I also got a car charger (not shown), I will talk about the charger later, the bag is perfectly satisfactory if a bit tight but in a nice touch it has a hole on the side so you can charge the Plug while it is still in the Bag

Usage

Using the Plug is logical and simple, turn it on at the front and get shown a little LED % readout, and then there is a separate switch to turn on the AC power, the % indicator remains on during use, I plugged in my laptop and then every USB port, and it just took it like a champ, happily worked on it for a few hours till the % readout read 00 and then it turned off,I unplugged my stuff and then plugged in the included charger, the % counter then slowly counted back up till it read 99 then FF (for full)…… don’t know what I expected but it behaved perfectly.

Notes

  • Not for Planes : Now this thing is not to be taken on a plane either in hand luggage on checked in, it’s well over the limit (which I think is 27,000Mah), but that is OK, there are plenty of battery packs that handle that area of the market (ChargeTech themselves makes one, and I have the omnicharge from another Kickstarter coming soon anyway <looks guilty>

Niggles

Even though the Plug is a product from an existing company and not just a Kickstarter newbie it does have a couple of bits that are not perfect

  • Charger The charger that comes with the the Plug is a basic off the shelf job and it shows, particularly in contrast to the build quality of the Plug its self, it’s a 43W charger in the case of 75W/90W charger and this is a special crime in a product that is designed to be portable, however all is not lost, the plug uses the most common barrel power connector and I suspected it uses the same charge circuit as their other AC power products which will accept an input voltage of between 19.5v and 24v according to their manuals, this was supported by the fact that the AC charger provided is 24v but the car charger is 20v, a brief dig around in the old cables box unearthed an old 40Watt Lenovo charger that worked perfectly was better build quality and was a fraction of the size, for shame ChargeTech, for shame!!

  • Charge Levels The charge % on the front has a couple of numbers it seems a bit fond of, mine, in particular, seems very fond of 9% and 64% I don’t know why, but the first couple of times using it I actually thought it was broken.
  • Power Low After a week in my bag, I took the Plug out and checked the % …. it was at 70%, WTF!!! … after a minor panic, I realised that because the on/off button is a raised one on the front, it was simply getting turned on in my backpack, so I will have to get a couple of small rubber glue on feet to stick either side of the button to prevent this, perhaps make this button recessed in a future release.

Conclusion

I like the Plug, it’s a slightly strange beast, it has the feeling of something that was designed and build by Techs, then finished off by accountants, the 250 Watt outage is done perfectly and will make a real difference to my remote working, though I wish you could do a trickle charge off USB-C or some other method.

The sheer size of the 54,000mah battery was a joy, taking a few hours of my Lenovo P50 running flat out plus all the USB ports in use to kill it, it fills a gap in the battery market that has been open for a long time and I am glad I now have one.