"There's a button." "WTF is the button for?" "I have no clue what that's for." "I'm obviously gonna have to press it" "Right, that has to be investigated as well. One moment please." "That took a while because there were a couple of interesting things...." This is why we subscribe. Thank you Clive, for being Clive and for sharing your videos with us.

Only half way thru "what the f*#/ is the button for" had me rolling.

"What the f*** is the button for?" Great t-shirt texts. I thought it was the hopi logo. So unassuming. lol

if you want to relive that button moment 5:15

"there is a button" "wtf is the button for" that cracked me up.This is why clive's videos are amazing, you are just a genuine and funny person that shows in your content.

I reckon the numbers 1-24 you can select in the annual power consumption part are the number of hours per day the device is in use?

That button comment has to go into the Big Clive highlights video when someone makes it.

"There's a button ... WTF is the button for? ... I have no clue what that's for .. I'm obviously gonna have to press it" I was so hoping for the display to change to "Please do not press this button again"

2:44 “..end up with a gap if I did try to turn it around”. But what the hell, it already has a deathdapter style mains socket, mains voltage clip in speaker terminals, and a user accessible live battery compartment round the back! What’s one more design defect amongst friends!

I just took delivery of a HOPI today based on Clive having one. Good enough for Clive to use in his videos, good enough for me. Greetings from Australia.

Love the battery cover that exposes live terminals !

Just here to tell that HOPI is being unboxed right now ❤ The T button is now described in the manual: "Key: adjust hours, display model, clear energy data. Remark: w hen display active power power will a lternate display the hours of load." There is also long and short press operation with graph provided! It can show even "annul CO2 consumption". Remember that "it will automatically stores the current operation as long as you not to press the key for more than 3s"!

uH-- = Complex (or apparent?) power (datasheet says it's active electric energy) AEC = Annual electricity costs APC = Annual power consumption CO2 = Annual CO2 consumption L-UP = Upper limit of power When the display shows 'uH--', the display below it shows the apparent power. In the video, calculated apparent power is 5.645VA (slightly offset, it is 6.86VA), and when the displays changed to show another value, it is defined as load time, which is the combined value of those two displays, 0001 17.42 = 117.42h of load time (datasheets says h, I don't know what it is for). USB section is just used for USB-to-serial port converter, but the IC is omitted on the board. Additional note: The range it goes between 1 and 24 is both to set up an alarm for upper power limit and to set hours for APC.

HAHAHAHA! I've never heard you swear like that over a button!

Unbelievable!! After all this time, you find a button on the Hopi!

To test it properly I want you to plug the Hopi meter into a Hopi meter.

The pulse output on the metering chip is often exposed on terminals which can be wired to an external recording system, most usually a building management system (BMS), or a dedicated pulse counting logger. Advantage: simplicity, disadvantage: any failure of the monitoring system and pulses are missed (with a BMS, notouriously pulses might be missed if the microcontroller is too busy doing other things, or comms to the central unti fail). The alternative is a serial communications protocol between the meter and BMS, most commonly MODBUS, a variant of RS485.

3:45 “Without taking the circuit board out...” Two seconds later- the board is coming out...! Thanks for that.

You mentioned the lower current range HOPI meter which had me interested, based on a quick search the only place that came up for HOPI meters appears to be aliexpress. The HOPI HP-9800 model does have a "HP-8173" listed in the description below rated up to 2.5A and "active power test range" 0.01W~550W instead of 0.5W~4400W of the HP-9800. The only minor issue appears to be that no HP-8173 is anywhere to be found, not on aliexpress nor on other places at the internet. There is also some documentation on that description about the button btw (any weird spelling below is directly from their image) "AEC: Annul electricity costs APC: Annul Power Consumption uH__: Active electric energy CO2: Annul CO2 Consumption L-UP: Upper limit of Power" Yet another interesting bit here, they have button press instructions consisting of long (>2s) and short (

That's easily the best reaction anyone has ever had to a button.

I was waiting for the teardown of this thingy. Amazing!

Great video, Amazing that after so many uses already, you revealed that magic hidden button.

I love you videos Clive. I understand about half of what you're talking about with the circuitry, the rest is just over my head until I have the time to sit down and learn about it. Nonetheless, I love your stuff.

Hi! The variability of mains AC frequency is a lot greater than we often assume. While the grid is regulated closely, and the frequency is maintained at 50hz almost perfectly over longer time frames (think days), it can swing around considerably in the short term. Excursions of up to a few hundred millihertz are not uncommon, and smaller deviations are constant. The stability of the quartz crystal inside your Hopi will contribute some, but over the short term and with a constant ambient temperature I think what you're seeing on the display is pretty accurate.

Am I the only one who was half expecting one of the displays to say "RTFM" eventually? :P

@bigclivedotcom, I've been looking at the datasheet and the communication to the processor is SPI, which means the speed of communication can be anything, so I guess you could put a faster crystal on the processor side without any apparent issues. I'm guessing the CS5463 Xtal speed is 4.096Mhz (which was shown in the datasheet examples). It IS a pretty amazing chip.

I bought one of these devices from Aliexpress after I saw you using it in one of your videos. Great little device and great videos.

I like the flickery display, it adds to the charme of this channel. Not everything has to be professional, a little bit of flicker fits with what is written in the channels about page: "So just like a normal workshop really." Also unexpected button was unexpected.

I quite like the flickering effect. It's something you don't see on most modern electronics in videos anymore, since everything is usually so high speed you just get bars along the screen, if anything at all.

In my world, Hopi (long o, named after the Hopi Tribe of Arizona) is a Labrador who enjoys chewing on Flukes.

If any of your phones have a high speed camera function, it could be vaguely interesting to see a slowmo shot of the leds so we can better understand how they are driven.

Clive, here in the US, power stablizers/cleaners are a way of life in the world if high end light and sound. At a planetarium I used to frequent in my youth used Xenon arc lamps. They are expensive and kept blowing. Power company said all was fine, until a bunch of high school kids and teacher got out their meters and found just how dirty the wall power was. Will remember that meter going back and forth well past my 50's (since I am 60, done). After the "Power Cleanser" was installed, life of the lamps literally tripled. Sad but true. The 60HZ frequency appears to be a guideline. Can vary from 58 to 63 Hz. Your meter is probably very accurate in that regard, power is probably that dirty! Keep the very interesting and occasionally weird videos coming! And Americans do not have hotdogs in a can...just saying...we call those sausages...

According to the manual, the 1-24 is number of hours in a day that the device is used. uH is "Active Electric Energy," AEC is "Annual Electricity Costs," APC is "Annual Power Consumption," and CO2 is "Annual CO2 Consumption."

so CS5463. That's a lot of functionality in one little chip. As ever, brilliant video and now I have that chip on my radar for a project. Thanks B.C.

True bravery and optimism - taking apart one of your most vital measuring tools.

Ohh... That button reminds me of a secret button inside my old CRT TV remote, it has the rubber pad with the carbon contact but it's very shallow and the label has buried the hole it's sitting in, use a needle and press it reveals a service menu that let you change a lot of things like overscan, rotate the screen...

that geniune reaction to the button was comedy gold. thanks for the laugh, i needed it today.

The RC04V is FRAM memory. These FRAM parts are fairly common in applications where a relatively small amount of non-volatile storage is required. Being non-volatile they'll hold their contents without power applied, much like Flash does, but they don't need the complicated unlocking sequence before writing. My company uses them for storing fault logs, elapsed time indication, unit identification information, etc.

This was a fantastic tear down! Now, I want to know more!!

Regarding mystery optocoupler: it could be for creating a nice square wave for mains frequency counting ( if that specialized power-monitor IC wants it that way )

The Hopi is coming apart? I'm making dinner and watching this! Wow, rock on!

1-24 may be how many hours the appliance will be used per day.

Awesome I was waiting for this 😎

This reminds me of a sequence from Titan A. E. ... Gune: "Does this look familiar? Do you know what it is? Neither do I. I made it last night in my sleep. Apparently I used Gindrogac. Highly unstable. I put a button on it. Yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do."

Great video Clive

The mysterious button had me gasping for breath, havent laughed like that in several months!

Sweeeeeet :) I want one even more now! I know you sometimes use them but I would take the speaker conns out seeing as you have the quick block for non plugged things :) x Loving the battery compartment of death :D

Can you imagine Clive in an Ulduar raid, getting to Mimiron and seeing the BIG RED BUTTON on the wall that says DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON.

OMG I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR YEARS!!!

You can stop the display flicking on the camera by turning down the lights in the room, thus causing the camera to compensate for the dimmer light by changing its shutter to effectively stay constantly open (or at least not be shut for so long during each video frame).

The not meassuring low loads could be to avoid a ADC-offset from building up a bill. Smart-meters (and mechanical ones) have a thing about not metering at very low power to avoid ghost-load. Basically inperfections that "make the disc spin" at absolutely NO LOAD.

You could theoretically put a faster osc in the board without affecting the serial communication, where it's SPI or I2C, they both have a clock pulse line Although look at the datasheet for the microcontroller for max clock speed, i would say it's max would be 20Mhz, but don't quote me on that

1...24 hours of daily use - then it also makes sense with the kWh/year

Unexpected mystery buttons inside devices are like free candy unexpectedly

For anyone curious like I was, I purchased one and have the manual. HAND-HELD POWER MONITOR, Operating Instructions MODEL: HP-9800/20A, HP-8713/2A Shenzen HOPI electrnoic technology co. LTD. 1. Description of menu and key REC - Annual electricity costs APC - Annual Power Consumption CO2 - Annual CO2 consumption uH - Active electric energy L - UP - upper limit of power Short press: Press key less than 1 s Long press: Press key more than 2 s 2. Set the allarm upper limit of power and the hours for annual pwoer consumption Short press Set the amount of hours per day to calculate annual power consumption 3. Set the display content Reset device by unplugging and plugging in Long press "FREQUENCE" segment display shows: A. Active electrical energy, "uH--" short press B. Annual electricity cost "REC" short press C. Annual CO2 consumption "CO2" short press D. Annual Power Consumption "APC" Note: When set to display "uH--" model, display the load time: 1880.5h (No idea what the hell this means) 4. Clear the electrical power data and load time Reset device by unplugging and plugging in A. Long press until 'FREQUENCY' segment display shows 'uH--' B. Long press once more until 'FREQUENCY' segment display shows 'REC' 5. Storage operation It will automatically store the current operation as long as you do not press the key for more than 3s Note: After some experimenting you are able to set the kWh price when using the AEC mode a. Switch to Annual energy cost mode b. Short press and set the price per kWh The range is $0 to $20 per kWh.

Sounds like we need a high speed camera to check the display

You could always remove the opto-isolator and see if any readings look suspicious or wrong. That may give a clue as to it's purpose.

Clive, I have a similar meter from Banggood or Fasttech and it came with a Chinese manual. I complained about the fact that they didn't supply an English manual with it and they were kind enough to translate it for me. I believe the button is used to set up the device to do longer measurements. I'm not sure since it was quite some time ago but I can lookup the e-mail and send you a copy.

Quite a bit more sophisticated than I’d expected

Big thank you for sharing your wisdom I've only been watching for a month or so and my toolbox is bulging with gadgets I've seen on your channel the Hopi is my next gadget, 😁

Tips for flickering display i found online. Put two identical videotracks at 50% seetrough and 1-2 frame offset in the video edit software. It's used to fix when you recordet at the wrong framerate compared to mains Hz. But it might work at higher refresh rates as well. Thanks for the cool video.

Haven't watched the video yet. I wanted to save this one for the weekend but couldn't wait. Let the fun begin.

If you work out the annual power consumption for the load to be connected 24/7 it reads way out. By pressing the button to around 23 it reads nearer what you would expect the consumption to be over a year of use.

we should send Clive boxes with a secret button, see if he dares press them, perfectly normal little LED devices or summat, see if he can find the button, then engineer something harmless that happens when said button is pressed. well I might. In fact I have a plan...He'll see straight through it but its a plan nonetheless.

Ran out of things to tear down?? few days ago I bought a toy from Walmart that was on clearance and called "Boxer Robot", seemed very interesting until I took it apart to see what chips are there and found 3 black "blobs". I was disappointed, so I put it together and returned it. now I got the thought that I should've sent it to you.

It can be surprising how unstable the powerline frequency actually is. In the United States I've been watching and logging it for several years as a hobby. There are times I've noticed drops of over 0.040 Hz and later been able to read the Nuclear Regulatory Commission website and verify a nuclear reactor in another part of the country had to go offline at that time. U.S. power grid is divided into at least 3 parts so dips in another part are not noticeable in this part.

This video won't change my life in any way... but it was just so interesting as ever.

uH - current power consumption APC - annual power consumption numbers - number of hours a day the thing is on - want 24 for constant use measurements RTFM, i think

Is the button for setting the cost of a unit of electricity?..this will display the total cost per year of the load applied

possible functions for the "WTF button" -triggers the earth shattering kaboom -switches between metric and SAE units -launches North Korean nukes -its the missing AZ-5 button from Chernobyl

The mains frequency will vary on The Isle of Man just by a few folk turning on and of things. For a larger grid such as the UK it has been found that frequency changes can be recovered from such things audio recordings and give an accurate time and date for them rather like a finger print !

Bloody marvellous

was about to suggest to change the crystal but, didn't think of the baud rate, Clive is sharp as always

Very nice. I've seen the Hopi in a lot of your videos and it's nice to see how it's made. The dedicated power meter chip is really surprising! The mystery button though..... have you tried to contact the manufacturer about it? They might be happy to explain it to you.

the photo blow up is at just the right angle that its fooling my eye into thinking youre actually holding it. top shelf special effects

"What the fuck is the button for!?!" Best line of 2019 - Big Clive

Just wanna say i have a Hopi meter too, also UK, and i just checked the fuse inside the plug and its a 13A fuse that they've bridged with some solder and copper wire... Might be worth checking yours, and maybe even the new meter you have (even tho the new one isn't rated at 4500W)

Thank you!! Nice to see something you use regularly can still surprise you!! Love the "Live terminal cover", doesn't seem like something that could, or should be battery powered so I wonder why the cover is even there??

Clive, I think you are the same as me: I love pulling my new "toys" apart, just for a look look see what's inside!

Is there not a user manual for the Hopi somewhere? Might shed some light on the button functions.

If you set the number to 2 you get the monthly power consumption, which I personally find more useful. Unfortunately my hopi doesn't remember the cost per kWhr, so you have to set it every time if you want to have a direct display of cost. Also the male plug gets hot at only 8A for a few seconds, so I will probably change it. And in my unit the soldering of the thick wires was pretty bad, so I resolder it before use. I forgot to mention, if you hold the button for a couple of seconds more you reset the energy and time of the "uH" screen.

waaait a minute! looks super familiar case! It's the rigexpert! :D

It would take 168 capacitors but I wonder if you could put a capacitor across each led in the display so the flicker on the camera would be a brightness flicker rather than a hard on/off

I just got my Hopi today and there were two issues, it had the wrong country plug and the red filter doesn’t completely line up over the LEDs so the left side is really bright. I attached the correct plug myself and I hope I got the polarity right but I’d googled it beforehand, (I’m not a sparky). The case easily came apart in your hands, mine is very tight and I couldn’t insert the spudger tool. I watchwd this video a couple of months ago and I’ve now looked at it again and I know that I can access the LEDs as soon as I get the case open.

The 2 columns of displays run in parallel rather than series. If you pause the video when the meter is displaying (at the end of the vid), you can see matching blank LED segments on each column.

Optocoupler on input is simply there to provide a reset to a watchdog timer. Mains fails and the timer overflows, providing a way to write the data to the ferroelectric memory on power fail, without killing the memory with writes. Probably there is a version with a non volatile memory storage that stores some data long term after power failure, so needs this timer.

Funny and great video clive gotta get my self one

Looks like you could swap the speaker terminal for shrouded banana sockets quite easily.

Best Clive's sentence ever 😂 5:18

2:35 A little bit of filing and some how glue n she'll be right 👍🏻 If it was me then I'd definitely stick a double pole switch in for those speaker terminals AND a fast blow fuse because they're only rated for 3A at 50V so that's almost 6x the voltage rating! 🤯

Just an FYI, Most industrial power meters use a "Transducer" which operates from about 90 Volts to 280 Volts to power the unit. The current input is most often 5A for the base transducer. Then current transformers are used for metering higher currents, and Potential transformers are used to measure higher voltages. These are used by utilities for example to meter 13.8KV power at for example 1,000 A for 13.8 MW reading. The transducer is programmed for the appropriate scale factors even though the base instrument operates on up to 5A and up to 280V. Most of these are designed to measure VA, Watts, Power Factor, Harmonics, Volts, and Watt Hours. Most are factory configured for 3 phase power and most can be configured for single phase. The actual transducers are not that expensive and can be found online. You can buy the Current Transformers if needed. For my diesel generator I have 150:5A current transformers and don't use potential transformers. Many of the transducers do not have terminals for current, but have current transformers for you to pass the 5A current wire. For your videos you might want to pick one up with an LCD instead of LED display. Sometimes they are listed as a multi function digital panelboard meter. You found the right ones when the spec sheet specifies the input current is 1/5Amps and 3 or single phase. This is industry standard for industrial power measurement. The instrument will have a power connection to power the device and a metering input for 0- typically 280 or 480 volt range. Display will switch between Watts/Volts/Amps/VA/PF for each phase and K and M scales of it such as KW or MW, V, KV, MV as they can be scaled to display properly when using transformers for metering. Google a Theta 30 Single or 3 Phase Transducer for an example meter with an LCD display. There are many to choose from.

I just found out the HOPI power meter is EXPENSIVE AS HELL. Either its because of you or just because of it being actually quite useful

Yayyyyyy I thought surely you had to have done it before, but couldn’t find it on your channel

I've seen breakout modules for the CS5460A IC (not the CS5463 as seen here) on AliExpress, but they only really provide you with the IC and a few resistors & capacitors - they don't include the current shunt or voltage divider (or the current transformer/potential transformer for that option), nor any of the filtering and other components that are required by the datasheet. Besides the CS5463's 2.5V reference having a better temperature coefficient (25 ppm/℃ vs. 30 ppm/℃ typical, but both have the same specified maximum of 60 ppm/℃), I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between the CS5460 and the CS5463, but I've not spent long reading the data sheets. There's also a CS5464 version, which describes itself as a "Watt-hour meter on a chip" and looks generally a bit better, though its temperature coefficient is 40 ppm/℃... All three of them are ~$2-2.50 in single quantities on LCSC, but can be found for a fraction of that cost on AliExpress (which is less-trustworthy than LCSC, but honestly I've never had a problem buying cheap ICs from AliExpress before; I wouldn't want to rely on them for critical or professional applications, but for hobby use they're probably fine...).

I'm willing to bet that 2nd optoisolator going into the display driver brain box is literally just a clock signal for switching the multiplexer between digits. It would also explain the slow flicker.

I hope you noticed the apparently loose/cold solder joint of the incoming green wire as seen at the lower right of your photo of the board.

Clive, love the irony, live connections covered by flimsy lid, yet what appears to be warning symbol on board, which you cannot access! Maybe that AEC, isn't and it's REC just using simpler and cheaper digits, so can record data, as it has memory chip? Also then the USB provides instant and recorded data capture facility possibly?

I guess the counting up from 1-24 is the hours a day the device is on for calculating the annual power consumption.

Been waiting for this

Oh my god I've stumbled across a "Big Clive EXCLUSIVE" I'm so excited I could squash a haggis! lol