Well… as expected, at 12V 2A discharge rate efficiency increased a bit vs 5V 1A. 75% if the pack was 145Wh, and 87% if it was 125Wh with the chinese cells. Draw your own conclusions!
They answered to my question on indiegogo and I guess they tried to tell Sanyo GAs are being used?
Kinda confirming that they’re not replacing the cells, claims that high performance ones are being used but then never states which exact cells they are?
I guess that only means one thing… MR30 adapter time 
Thanks for the test! Seems like it does have the lower capacity cells as 75% efficiency would be quite bad. You could test this by fabricating a cable between the batteries and electronics and measuring power in/out of the thing. Or use a bench PSU. I’m assuming the signal pin is not connected.
What I gather from that bs marketing speak is that they are in fact using the BAK cells. Otherwise they would state it directly what batteries are in there.
The middle signal pin from the battery is throwing some reading but I don’t think it matters for the discharge test, took the battery out and at ~30% charge I’m getting a reading of 21.6V, which I assume means cells in 6S2P config. At fully charged voltage it should be 25.2V, just slightly above what my ZL1100 can handle (24V) but I think it will do just fine. AVHzy CT-2 can handle up to 26V.
My cheap bench PSU is limited to 15V, ironically the omni ultimate itself was probably the best choice for this task.
I’ll solder leads directly to the ZL1100 and perform a slow 1A discharge rate. that will give us some clear answers.
Could it be a temperature signal or does it vary all the time?
It seems to drop after being removed from the main unit and i’m not clear what is its purpose.
Left to right
Pin 1 is negative
Pin 2 is also negative
Pin 3 is positive
Reading goes like this:
Pin1-2: 15mV
Pin1-3: 21.83V
Pin2-3: 20.95V
I’m confused now. When the pack is fully charged pin1-3 should be the one that reads 25.2V
There’s no need to even test the battery pack, they just confirmed chinese cells inside all ultimate units sand spare batteries.
According to Omni they have sold:
230V Ultimates: total of 784 orders
120V Ultimates: total of 1996 orders
Spare Batteries: total of 921 orders
3,701 battery packs, each with 12 cells inside: 44,412 CHINESE CELLS instead of brand name ones we were suppose to receive, they raised more than a million and decided to do the nasty switcheroo on us to save a couple dozen thousands of dollars.
Seems like they wanted to up their profit margin significantly.
They raised more than a million dollars, and if we consider each chinese cell being $1.5 cheaper that’s only ~$60,000. Heck, even $20 powerbanks have LG F1 inside, which is not a good cell by any means, but at least it’s decent. I’m so terribly disappointed.
Worst part is, I explained the whole situation to indiegogo and all they had to say is to “contact the campaign manager”. The folks over the campaign poge comment section are so busy asking for tracking numbers that they don’t even care about the lemons they’re about to receive.
I guess I’ll have to go to reddit, amazon and youtube then.
Yes. But 60k$US is still 60k$US of profit for them.
We need to spread the word out, and punish them.
If they used CHEAPER Samsung 30Qs, I wouldn’t have said anything in regards to internal resistance.
That would’ve been a good justification.
Who knows what could be happening behind the scenes…
If they start to cheap out on 18650s, maybe they’ll start cheaping out on electronics too…
Already on it, my comments are all over their indiegogo comment section, some folks there seem to believe whatever lie Omnicharge feeds them and refuses to even look at the evidence. “Perhaps these new cells are indeed better than the previously planned one” :person_facepalming:
So I went ahead and started a thread on reddit, where usually some degree of common sense is found.
I’m just so pissed that what was supposed to be my reliable variable DC power supply, MPPT solar energy storage unit and mobile power bank has the main component wrong. I don’t even use chinese cells on the cheapest of my flashlights, I can’t accept them on a $300 device.
Could you link to the thread?
I mean, if they wanted to use cheaper Chinese cells, they should’ve least sprung for these bad boys:
These are actually very nice cells at 3400mAh 10A capable cells.
I mean, they still should’ve gone with 30Qs, but still. They could’ve switched to more capable cheaper cells… but they didn’t.
IMO there is simply no reason other than cost cutting, discharge rate was no excuse, the Omni ultimate maxes out at 150W output power which is barely more than 1C.
I don’t see any mention in the manual how to limit the current from the DC output. How is that done? They only mention setting the voltage. I’d like to use the Ultimate to power an LED and limit the current to for example 1A regardless of voltage.
That has been a listed feature since the beginning
Got an aswer to the current limit.
Did that work out?
Someone mentioned on reddit that if you’re making your own MR30-DC cable for the Ultimate you need to bridge the two negative pins on the MR30 connector (the grouped ones). Not sure if that holds for the battery connection as well.
For some reason my ZL1100 went haywire mid discharge. Not sure if it’s the voltage or it got overheat. Seems like a fuse is blown and won’t discharge anything at all now. At least it served me well for 2 years, I’m more pissed by the fact that we’ve got Chinese cells inside the ultimate, and a fake energy rating.
As for the MR30 on the battery side, the isolated one and the middle are negative. The other one is positive. Middle and positive measures 1.0V less than - and +. Fully charged at 25.2V as expected.
While this is not my war, I'd like to point out that there may be other reasons besides “cheaping out”, “cost cutting”, “piss whoever off” and drama etcetera after their decision for the neither omni nor ultimate power bank cells. Price is not the only factor, availability counts too.
If you like huge and powerful power banks you can also take a look at chargetech's lineup.
With regards to the false advertising thing, not long ago someone at ForoLinternas told me he found these cells (NCM/NCA Battery——Cylindrical Cell @ EVE Energy Co. Ltd.) inside a NEB1002-H1 Segway battery pack, while they do claim to use Litio Li-Ion LG (LG cells) at least in their related Spanish product page.
I believe there are a lot more valid players in the battery industry now, a lot of them in china. This is not a concern for me, the lack of honesty and namely the reasons behind may.
That’s too bad. I’ll test mine when I get it with the EBD-A20H.
I have nothing against using Chinese batteries either, if they have been tested properly. It’s just that they lied and the capacity is not what was advertised.
It’s been many years since I received a powerbank with false energy or capacity rating. One would assume that in 2019 such things no longer happens, much less with a device that costs $350.
Had they used some cells that would at least compare to the Sanyo GA like the super cheap and easily sourced LG F1 I would probably be fine. But there is “142Wh” printed on the back of the unit, that I cannot stand. There is an image in one of their updates from 6 months ago already showing the bak cells, they had plenty of time to explain and justify the changes if they wanted to. Now that is shady.
Sourcing 44,000 cells aren’t difficult either when they had months to do that. A quick trip on alibaba shows more sellers than my fingers can count willing to supply 100,000+ cells per week. When you got the money you just get things done. That’s how China works.
Indiegogo policy dictates that the campaigner must deliver the product, but doesn’t specify it must comply with the spec it was marketed with. That’s up to the backer and project owner. There is no PayPal claim, and obviously omnicharge isn’t answering my emails, after I went the extra mile to expose them. 