Hi all!
Just to tell you that the iStick hit the European markets yesterday. It was on-sale in a known seller here in Spain.....and it flew-off the shelves in just some hours....
Luckily, I ordered mine which is expected to arrive next Wednesday, tops....(slow inexpensive courier). As usual, it costed 36. Usually the USD to Euro change for this things is 1:1, regardless the real change rate, something related to customs and taxes, you know......
Regarding the so-callled 'new-PWM-gate', I'm curious.... In the past, I solved some issues with other VW devices just measuring the voltage output with a voltmeter, over an open dripper. Somebody did that in this manner but it seems that the results weren't conclusive enough.... It seems to me that you're expecting some oscilloscope readings from a trusted technician, namely Phil Busardo.
Well, there is a cheap and easier roundabout strategy: just using an old-fashioned, old-school voltmeter, those with squared coils and a needle pointing to the reading, usually with a mirror behind the needle tip, on the reading chart, to improve the reading and the accuracy. A Pure Analog V-meter. they should read voltage in root mean squared terms, they have to, because of its innards and the foundations of measuring in that way.
I've got one, and I'll get my iStick soon, but in the meantime, just put it (if you have one) over the posts of a dripper, preferrally without wick (the vapours can burn), and get a proper V
rms reading.
It appears that the iStick do not offer V
rms, but V
ave or whatsoever.... and it shows that odd parameter on display. Even worse, it uses it for its own internal application of the Ohm's law, according to what I've seen on the net... If that is the case, the power won't be accurate enough (to say it mildly). Power is proportional to the square of V
rms, because of the very definition of the statistics involved, and also the generation of energy (power is energy over time) from the Coulomb's effect....
So if the iStick is using other voltage different than V
rms to calculate power..... bad, their bad! It will fail to adress correct reading of voltage and power in lower settings (when the PWM pulse hits harder with wider gaps) and it will be just correct only on the higher settings (when the PWM is incidental, because at 100 % of output the wave it shows is a plain, flat, DC current. or almost). Using averages instead of cuadratic averages renders higher real wattages because power (and energy unfolded) is proportional to that cuadratic power of voltage, averages for a squared wave have this disadvantage...
And it's a really easy patch from software to fix it......I wonder if the first batch could be fixed over the net....
