Submitted 19 hours ago by Moonrise2473@feddit.it to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/90186b22-e336-4e13-9b5a-10706dde4ea8.jpeg
I hate this scale, it says low battery and shuts off after just 3 months of sitting in the drawer. It infuriates me that there’s still a lot of energy in the battery, I can use that in remote controls with no issues
If there’s enough battery to say “low battery”, then there’s enough battery to show the measurements!
I had a scale that kept measuring! It was great! I lost so much weight in the week before the battery finally gave out! Too bad my clothes didn’t get any looser and all that weight came back on when I replaced the battery, but for a short moment in time weight loss became super easy!
This is probably not what you wanna hear, but when the battery gets low, the current gets weaker. If the current gets too weak, the scale becomes more and more inaccurate. Like, wildly so. In other words, the alternative is to lie to you. Badly.
I’m bummed that when I had a Thinner bathroom scale, I could weigh myself before and after using the bathroom to see how much I expelled. It was consistent and really useful knowing its precision during keto months (lost up to 3lbs a week). Now I have a Taylor scale that will report the same weight over and over if it’s relatively awake and you change less than 5lbs.
Agree. For clarity, the circuits that show the low-voltage status are much less hungry for current than the circuits that measure weight. So no, having enough battery to report low voltage does not imply that there is enough to make an accurate weight measurement.
I have the same scale and bought a few rechargable ithium-Ion AAAs and they work line a charm having a constant voltage until empty.
Only downside is that you don’t get any warning when they are about to run.
I replaced mine with a usb cable. No batteries.
CR2032 batteries are hit and miss in my experience. Sometimes my car FOB burns through one a month2 and other times they’ll last years.
Get brand name CR2032, the cheap stuff doesn’t supply enough voltage and electronics don’t like em.
In my experience you can feel how good they are by how heavy they weight in your hand.
I know this isn’t helping but your scale is saying “ok lol”
Normal AA or AAA battery, or a CR<something> button? If it is a button cell, try wiping it with alcohol before you insert it. Many modern button cells have a coating that tastes horrible to prevent people (children) from taking them into the mouth. I’ve noticed that on some brands, this coating measurably increases the resistance of the cell, not only reducing the the power it can deliver, but als making it appear “emptier” than they are ofor the measuring circuits. Wiping off the coating with alcohol (90% isopropanol) expanded the cells’ life (in a kitchen scale to boot!) significantly.
My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.
So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.
This may or may not help, but a nickel is very close to 5 grams. You may be able to slap something silly together with a bunch of nickels taped together :P
It’s a cr2032 from Duracell with that coating, later I’m going to try that
For decades scales worked just fine without any electricity. Maybe get one of those.
There’s also the option of electronic scales which are rechargeable via USB
Didn’t think you were going to get a bunch of nerds telling you exactly why it works this way 🙄
“Bruh just use the finger scale to weigh out your weed. 1 finger = 1.7g and 2 fingers = 3.5g”
I believe I have this exact same scale, and I also hate it. My main problem is that those capacitative buttons sometimes refuse to work, and it’s real nice when I’m trying to measure something in grams and it randomly gets stuck in pounds.
Thorry84@feddit.nl 18 hours ago
That’s because of the way these scales work. They use a material that deforms under stress and when it deforms the resistance changes. By putting current through this material and measuring the voltage drop, it can be mapped to how much stress the material is under and thus how much weight is on the scale.
This is a pretty roundabout way and has a lot of caveats, but it is very cheap. So cheap scales always work this way. That’s why they aren’t super accurate and have deviations depending on things like temperature. Another big downside is any permanent deformation ruins the calibration, giving incorrect results. That’s why you never put more weight on kitchen scales than it says, it will break them.
The issue you are running into is the way it measures. It applies a very specific voltage and current in order to get the result. The lookup table it uses is only valid within a narrow range. When the battery voltage goes outside that range, it can no longer perform the measurement. Even though there’s plenty of juice for things like the little processing chip and the LCD display. They don’t need a lot of power and can do with low voltages. But it can no longer weigh anything so it just errors out with a low battery warning.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Mighty informative, thank you
Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Look up piezolectric materials if you wanna know more
SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
All of which is fixed by a voltage regulator
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Eventually, the battery drops lower than the device needs. So no, none of which is fixed by a voltage regulator.
magikmw@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
Except the cheap part. But likely not by much.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Absolutely, My kitchen scale remains accurate and can use the same battery for years.
iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
No, not voltage, current.