eBay isn’t the only place where bad companies and individuals hang out. Regardless of the market, a lot of them are in China. Here’s some information about how to check for Chinese scam companies.

I bought 100 ER34615 lithium batteries with custom pigtail connectors from Shenzhen Enbar on Alibaba. Within a year, all of them were dead whether they had been used or not. This type of battery has a 20+ year shelf life. Taking the generically marked shrink-wrap off the failed batteries, there were numerous spot-weld marks on the battery anode where a different tab had been mounted.

I understand that every company occasionally has a bad batch so I reached out to them to analyze the failures, but they had no interest in that and suggested that I just buy more batteries from them! Their “engineer”: Eric Lee insisted that their batteries must be used within 6 months or they will be destroyed by passivation (the normal process of building up a thin oxidation layer that is precisely what gives the batteries their long storage life). He sent me a datasheet with the specs for their batteries that includes “Long Storage Life”…and complained that I had embarrassed him by bringing up the failures! They are obviously not a legitimate or reputable company.

It turns out that a common scam in China is to take batteries that have been sent for recycling, put new shrink-wrap on them and resell them as new (at a discount of course). Buyer beware.

I won’t be buying from Shenzhen Enbar again.

The XL6009 is a nifty, inexpensive switching voltage regulator from XLSemi. (see datasheet). There is also the XL6019 (see datasheet). They are great parts and operate over a wide input voltage range at high efficiency and their internal switch can deliver substantial current. They can operate in boost and SEPIC/Buck-Boost configurations

HOWEVER you need to be cautious when using the ENable pin (2): the datasheet indicates that EN is a TTL compatible input and considers anything over 1v4 as High (Enable) – that’s good. It also mentions that if left unconnected, the pin floats high (enabled) – that’s also fine.

What wasn’t apparent to me, and certainly isn’t spelled out in the datasheet, is that when the EN pin floats high, it is at Vin and can source enough current to do damage. So if you are using the converter to boost say 12V to 24V, you’d better not connect that EN pin directly to a microprocessor GPIO because the processor pin will be at 12V and will be destroyed! (as I learned the hard way)

The solution of course is simple, just use the processor GPIO to drive a transistor in an open drain/open-collector arrangement to disable the converter. A common 2N2222 or 2N3904 should work just fine over the full input range of the XL6009. Live and learn.