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bofr
Joined: 03 Feb 2008
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2011 6:43 pm Post subject: Barco remote and batteries |
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Yesterday the battery in my barco rcu died again.
Since I replaced the battery about four months ago i decided to do a little investigation.
The remote uses a standard 9v battery. Depending on load, manufacturer, temperature...this type of
battery normally have 400-600 mAh in it.
The chip in the remote will not function correctly below 6 V. The battery on the other hand will still have
20-25% of its capacity left (normal cutoff is more like 5 v).
Anyway, for simplicities sake lets say the battery contains 500 mAh of usable energy.
The current draw of the remote in standby is about 0,1 - 0,2 mA.
Going with the lower figure gives about 5000 hours.
Thats a bit more than 6 months of life in standby.
The remote consumes 100-400 times that when in operation..
The standby current is perfectly acceptable for normal remotes, they use AA or AAA batteries which contain up to and beyond four times the energy of the cells in a 9v.
Replacing the batteries every 2 years or so is not really a problem.
Replacing the battery after 4 months of moderate usage is..
I installed an On/Off switch at the side of mine.
/bofr
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RaWsHaRk
Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 131
Location: Finland
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| Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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I think you are buying bad brand of batteries, my RCU 800 has has the same battery in it for more than a year, and I use it almost every day.
_________________
Electrohome Marquee 7500.
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Curt Palme
CRT Tech
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 24396
Location: Langley, BC
TV/Projector: All of them!
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| Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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Good point. I had a no name battery here, a 9 volt that read 9.2 volts on my meter. Gave it the tongue test (!), it was fine. it would NOT power this one remote I had, no LED flashing, it appeared dead. I tried a Duracell, and it was fine. Turned out the battery had high internal resistance, so it had voltage, but no current.
I too have had batteries in multiple Barco remotes on my bench for years with no issues. Mind you, it's also possible that there is excessive current drain, I've seen that happen with remotes as well.
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bofr
Joined: 03 Feb 2008
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm. Well considering that the remote has gone trough 5 batteries (of various makes) in less than two years I
am thinking that Curt is right. Something is obviously wrong with the remote.
The on-off switch solved the problem regardless of the cause so not really worth the time to
fix properly.
/bofr
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DEADCRT
Joined: 15 Jun 2007
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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Measure current witch consumes your remote. Normally , 9V can be used for 1-2 years. Remote has three states from point of energy consumption : standby, working keypad scan, and IR transmitting. Highest current is for IR LED when command is transmitted. But I had few remotes with constantly working keypad scan without transmission. In this case IC in remote is defective. In some cases may be dirty PCB. If you have oscilloscope, then you easy find whats wrong.
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