Build your own charger

[ElectricGod]

Janky?
You are entitled to your opinion and feel free to buy things somebody else built and designed. BORING!
I'd say you are missing out on 2 important things.
1. The adventure of re-purposing something and having it actually work well.
2. The act of creating.
Sure I can just buy stuff ready made, but what fun would that be?
The best adventure you can have IMHO, is a crap car that you upgrade and turn into a nicely handling road rocket.
OK...an average EV that you make into a road rocket. That's a good adventure too.
BTW...go look at that PSU you posted. The 600v version delivers 3.3 amps AND those are Chinese amps. Probably reality is more like 1/3 of that.

i am totally for tinkering around, but there is a difference between creating a frankenstyle charger for fun and then using said frankencharger for daily use and expect it to be safe or reliable.

i got a older 120V 18A version of that supply and it has not problem running 15A for hours on end. i used it to bulk charge newly built big batteries in a reasonable time for testing.

I'll put it simply for you...

1. This is the 4th one of these I've personally built.

2. The first one I made from the smaller Lenovo PSU's in 2014. I used it for several months and then sold it to a friend in California. I believe he's still using it.

3. The oldest one from the larger PSU's, I made in 2015. I used it for more than a year before giving to a friend in the UK, he has a stand up scooter and uses my charger all the time.

4. Another I sold to a friend in Wisconsin, he uses it to charge summer and winter since 2017. He exclusively rides his e-bike for transportation. He has 2 more e-bikes for his wife and son. They too use my charger. This one sees easily 2-3x more use than any other one I've built since it charges 3 e-bikes.

5. The newest one is presented here. I'm expecting many years of usefulness from it.

6. I know of another one that I recently coached a friend through building in NYC. It's fairly new, but I have every expectation is will work well for many years.

NONE have ever failed or shown any evidence of having issues.

I'd call that some pretty reliable charging!

Believe what you like, but "janky and "frankenstyle " do not come close to describing using these PSU's as chargers!

 

[ElectricGod]

I'm pretty sure the main IC in the Lenovo PSU's is either the:

UC3524

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/uc3524.pdf

or the TDA8380

https://www.digchip.com/datasheets/download_datasheet.php?id=1791993&part-number=TDA8380

I'll have to do some pin tracing to figure which it is. Just checking the power legs will tell me a lot.

 

[flippy]

please do. i got half a dozen of them.

too bad they dont have CC/CV modes. if you could manually enable CC/CV mode that would make them perfect if they have the right voltage range. but the transformer is made for a specific voltage so you must have a fan if you want to change the voltages.

 

[ElectricGod]

please do. i got half a dozen of them.

too bad they dont have CC/CV modes. if you could manually enable CC/CV mode that would make them perfect if they have the right voltage range. but the transformer is made for a specific voltage so you must have a fan if you want to change the voltages.

I'm not setting the voltage radically different. A friend needs 66v so just another 2v per PSU.