Indigogo Bioo.tech - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: lorth
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2016, 03:16:38 am
content: Well ... :https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bioo-charge-your-phone-with-the-power-of-a-plant#/storyWhen you look at their website, things like 3.5V, 0.5A to charge the phone, or the exponential power increase when using their Bio Pannel, which doing some quick numbers they don't add up, or their 2-3 full phone charges per flower pot....I couldn't find how it actually does work...Any pointers on how this might actually work?

author: daveatol
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2016, 03:40:15 am
content: Quote from: lorth on April 19, 2016, 03:16:38 amWell obviously it's the biological nanowires.Otherwise, it could be an internal battery that will just discharge after a bunch of uses.

author: lorth
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2016, 04:27:19 am
content: Quote from: daveatol on April 19, 2016, 03:40:15 amWell..., thank you for pointing at what they say in their video.

author: Kalidor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2016, 05:34:04 am
content: http://www.plant-e.com/en/product/plant-e-diy-box-large/https://youtu.be/Ku1-_MOzkTE25 plants for one LED.

author: BiooTeam
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 21, 2016, 12:10:50 pm
content: Good morning!This is the Bioo Team of the official campaign.This is a response statement to the comments made in EEVblog about our technology.We are a company whose aim is to disrupt the energy game for better with an innovative technological solution. Doing so has great complexity and thus we appreciate all the constructive feedback.That said, our technical team has been using a range of 3,5v and 0,5A as it is our minimum registered. As we have previously mentioned in several occasions, we have implemented a new modulator so in the production of our plant pots we will assure a range of 5V and 1A in order to make any device suitable for Bioo.For the reasons previously stated, we are going to update the campaign information to reflect this and avoid further misunderstandings.Last but not least, we want to make clear that the plant does NOT suffer any harm. The elements that we need for the energy production are produced naturally during the photosynthesis process and expelled by the plant.We will be delighted to answer any doubts you may have.The Bioo Team

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2016, 12:38:25 pm
content: Hi BiooTeam, and welcome to the forum. Thank you for choosing to join in with the discussion about your product.I am a huge fan, this is a superb scam, and may well spur me on to having a go at one myself!I'll leave it to the more mathematically minded members to put up some numbers showing how your 15Wh a day are simply impossible, even if your pretend magical technology was real.Are you planning to deliver anything to your backers (a primary lithium cell in that pebble so they see it "work" a couple of times maybe?), or just do a TCharger?Keep up the good work, and remember: There's one born every day!

author: Xenoamor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 12:36:24 pm
content: But electricity already comes from power plants? I don't see where the market is for this

author: Kalidor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 04:06:06 pm
content: @ Bioo Team, look at Plant-e's video (my previous post) they say you need 15m^2 of plants on a roof with sunlight to charge one cell phone. They worked on this for several years and you want do do the same with one pot indoors? I doubt. 15m^2 of solar panels can deliver much more energy, so forget it.

author: StuUK
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 04:18:46 pm
content: Quote from: BiooTeam on April 21, 2016, 12:10:50 pmHere we go....

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 04:47:41 pm
content: Not another one. And they found EEVBlog... awesome, at least we're making a difference!Explain to us how the energy stack adds up, especially the excess "electricity" required to charge a phone when we all know that the purpose of photosynthesis is the production of sugars which the plant then metabolizes primarily for it's own use. If you look at the surface area of a plant, the actual energy and efficiencies and even the production of stored sugars and you could extract all of it in some magical way, there is no way in hell you could generate what you need to charge a phone, even if the plant could stay alive without any sugar being maintained for it's own biological processes.Furthermore, this complete bullshit about micro-organisms generating nanowires that are all lined up to permit electrical flow in the same direction of voltage potential, without shorting each other, is just garbage designed to confuse people.Either you are plugging the pot into the mains socket, or you are hiding a one-time use battery pack at the bottom of the pot, or the pot itself is a battery (with maybe some zinc and copper plating in the bottom part that starts working when you add water and "electrolyte" flows down from the plant food) that once it depletes will become useless.... Or what I think is the real situation, is that you will simply take people's money and fail deliver anything at all.BiooTeam is likely trolling the site trying to rouse responses and wasting our time. The only option I think makes sense is not to waste our time even debating this stupidity, and flagging the campaign... although IndieGogo continues to prove they are complacent in criminal activity and only US government legal action will stop them (or at least move them to foreign soil).Somebody should inform Thunderf00t about this ridiculous idea...Watch this magnesium copper battery using the damp soil as an electrolyte to barely power a Joule thief:There are a bunch of other videos using galvanized steel (which has a zinc coating) and copper or various other anode/cathode combinations and using wet soil as electrolyte, the plant is generally irrelevant to the battery function except that it forces you to keep adding water which may be required to refresh the electrolyte. But all of them power LED's.... which have piss-ant power requirements relative to charging a phone.... Orders of magnitude difference.Here's a good video you can even try to build it yourself... no plant needed:But what is the current output? And if you add enough of them in parallel to boost current, and have enough in series to have reached your voltage range, how much capacity will you get from your battery until it is depleted? You cannot add water indefinitely. It is not just the electrolyte that gets depleted... the actual metal anode/cathode will be depleted and unless you "recharge" the battery by reversing the process, your cells will become useless.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 09:38:03 pm
content: I see an anode on the outside, a cathode on the inside core. Electrolyte sponge/water in between. Presto, we have a battery. The rest of it is all bullshit... pseudo-scientific drivel designed to convince people there is something special going on.I applaud your effortsbut the one thing that I don't appreciate is bullshit and lying in order to con people out of their money. You think you couldn't sell your charging flower pot by telling the truth? Why?I still don't think the energy requirements add up.... but conceivably there can be a2 battery systemhere. A larger pot battery (using say Zinc/Copper) with enough capacity to continuously put out a voltage for a long time (as long as you refresh the electrolyte/water).The larger pot battery would supply slow trickle current needed to charge a smaller rechargeable LiIon battery pack in the central CORE. The Zinc/Copper pot battery would run 24/7 to charge up the smaller LiIon pack using say a boost converter. Then when you plug in your phone it actually charges off the LiIon battery (not the pot) and provide enough current to normally charge a phone.The rest of the day, the Zinc/Copper pot battery continuously charges the LiIon battery pack (albeit extremely slowly). As long as you keep adding water to the pot, and you have a biomass at the bottom to regenerate your electrolyte, it will be able to conduct. However, we don't know whether the system will end up in equilibrium and for how long... the salt content of the electrolyte will change, the metals making up the pot will oxidize/corrode and be expended. The system is guaranteed for 1 year, charging your phone fully 3 times a day.Tell the truth.... Don't B.S. people with this photosynthetic biomass nanowire garbage.And by the way... see this....http://blog.getbatterybox.com/how-long-can-100lbs-of-potatoes-charge-a-smartphone/You need a shitload of potatoes.... as they say in the blog post above and video. After about 5 hours, it charged only 5%. They used 110lb of potatoes to get 20mA out and estimated they would need 720 feet of copper and zinc tubing, along with 2,200lbs of potatoes to get somewhere close to 100% capacity of a phone.And in case it is not Zinc/Copper or other metal combination, but carbon-carbon bacteria battery, here is a MAKER instructions on how to do that. But it only is enough to make an LED blink. The scale required to charge a phone is still several orders of magnitude greater:http://makezine.com/projects/make-30/bacteria-battery/

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 10:02:23 pm
content: Even if they have invented a magical way to get electricity from sugars, thinking back to my GCSE biology lessons: photosynthesis produces sugars, ALL of which are either "burnt" by the plant during respiration, or storedin the fruit, none of them go down through the root system*, so how the feck would they get into the soil in this magical pot.*Root System are also a superb Ska Punk band...

author: chris77
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 14, 2016, 12:25:50 pm
content: Quote from: Xenoamor on April 22, 2016, 12:36:24 pmThis is what I needed today to get into a better mood. Thank you.

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 14, 2016, 06:34:31 pm
content: So beside the technical infeasability of this product due to plant physiology, it's still plain stupid from a product concept standpoint.Why should I pay 100€ for a gadget that charges my phone slower, is not portable and has a comparably short lifetime?Lets see:- Environmental concernsReally? How is this flower pot any more environmental friendly than a wall charger or a simple computer usb port? How does this flower pot compensate for the additional pollution during its production. How do you safely dispose "biological nanowires"? And what when the internal accumulator fails after a few years? I'm using some 10 year old wall chargers without any problem, would your product really work for that time without any issues?Doesn't sound so environmental friendly.Random other concerns:- convenience"Oh crap, I forgot to water my phone charger!""Sorry that I hadn't called for a month, my phone charger was still growing."- portability"Doesn't that cactus hurt in your back pocket?"

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 02:07:08 am
content: Well they've raised nearly EUR100,000 with still a few days to go...

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 10:58:04 am
content: I'm still not buying their bullsh#. My previous posts show various battery design videos using everything from standard batteries using soil as the electrolyte to potatoes and bacteria.... Still all will deplete due to corrosion/oxidation of the anode and cathode eventually (unless you flip a switch and reverse current to "recharge" them). All the examples, even the hugely scaled up version, produce piss-ant currents...orders of magnitude less than what is needed.So... until they spill the beans on what they are really doing, and what true output and lifespan is (I don't believe this crap about nanotubules and photosynthesis driving it) then it is all a big sham where at best they are selling you a large battery shaped like a pot where you supply the electrolyte in the form of moist soil.

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 01:05:05 pm
content: Quote from: edy on June 15, 2016, 10:58:04 amChill man, it's just a scam!

author: MarkS
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 04:05:47 pm
content: Quote from: Delta on April 21, 2016, 12:38:25 pmCorrection: Minute. "There's one born every minute."All the better, right?

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 10:27:08 pm
content: Quote from: Delta on June 15, 2016, 01:05:05 pmHonestly, I don't mind what they're doing if they were just honest about it. Maybe I would buy a flower pot made of copper with a huge piece of zinc inside of it, and soil "electrolyte" which I keep moist due to the need to constantly water a plant. Who knows, it may work for a year and when it stops, at least I have a nice plant growing in there.

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 15, 2016, 11:26:57 pm
content: They are clearly not planning on making or selling anything. This is an out-and-out scam, a la Triton.

author: Kalidor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 07:24:21 am
content: Quote from: Delta on June 15, 2016, 11:26:57 pmRead the last update."...Due to this situation, we have sadly decided to close down the crowdfunding campaign. All the contributions will be fully refunded to all backers in a time span of 24 hours."Looks for me not like a scam.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 06:17:58 am
content: No, only a scamattemptthat for once gave up early enough...

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 12:27:46 pm
content: Or just well-intentioned people who were clueless about the science involved.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 12:42:11 pm
content: The reason they quit was because they had practically no backers. 348 EUR out of 15,000 EUR with only 4 backers. Finally even this campaign was too much BS for average people to buy (or nobody likes to take care of plants).If they were raking in more money, they would have gladly continued. I suspect another version of this will come up in the future, perhaps with better marketing and paying news sites... better luck next time. I hope that the next version is backed by science and has some prototype data to back up the claims.

author: altaic
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 11:40:20 pm
content: Quote from: edy on June 17, 2016, 12:42:11 pmI think the backers are not listed because the project owners refunded them. The ones listed are from after they made their announcement about abandoning their project; some people don't even check the project status before throwing their money away.

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 18, 2016, 02:38:23 am
content: Quote from: edy on June 17, 2016, 12:42:11 pmThey had one hundred thousand Euros pledged.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 18, 2016, 12:25:34 pm
content: Really? 100,000? Wow. I'm sorry I didn't follow the campaign before closing. I saw only after the announcement. Anyone have a screen capture?I'm surprised but happy they did the right thing. Finally. But what, did they realize something new that their invention didn't work in the last few days? That they didn't know at the start of their campaign? Or did they get scared that with that kind of money they would have to deal with a sh*tstorm if they didn't deliver?Or maybe they included too much real information in their profile so could be too easy to get caught after the scam? Or maybe their lead scientist was a fraud and the rest of the team caught on?

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 18, 2016, 12:32:23 pm
content: I see it still in updates:QuoteAnd....Quote

author: Xenoamor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2016, 12:06:01 pm
content: If they have a working pre-production build like they're saying they do they wouldn't have an issue finding a producer