Setting up for single cell testing..

For some time now i've been wanting to get my lazy ass in gear and get setup for some cell testing, nothing elaborate by any means but at least some method to compare call X from Y and Z..

Step 1 :

This is a single cell 500mah ( 0.5 amp ) charger for 3.0~4.2v cells ( Most 18650 and 14500 cells will work with this thing.. )

Opened it up for a quick look.

Other side..

Notice the negative side charges thru the spring contact.. not ideal.. But i have a plan ! :wink:

Soldered a wire directly to both + and - terminals !

Now i need to get this thing :

To talk to this laptop and make me graphs via usb ( uncharted territory.... if you guys don't hear from me for the next few days i'm likely pulling what's left of my hair trying to make it all work proper.. )

I also got a brand new Fluke meter !!! this thing is so awsome compared to my old micronta meter, you get readings.. FAST.... no more waiting for the ... ... ... reading.

TrustFire?
What a name!
Have your extinguisher handy :wink:

Fire Extinguisher, Check !

Ok.. i have the 3010B charger talkin to the laptop, logview is showing data, playing with all the options, wowzers.... but it's not too bad.

Because i'm measureing a single cell i have not connected the ballance leads, so the Cell.1 graph is not recording, this took me a while to make sense of.. but so far so good..

Finally putting that laptop to good use !

the update software will not recognize the charger however, i tried to flash it to v 3.14 but no go... logview is picking it up via usb as COM3, but the update software wants nothing to do with it.. not sure if the input voltage has anything to do with it.. running the charger off a 24v meanwell atm.

fechter said:

Have your extinguisher handy :wink:

Click to expand...

Who needs one of those red things... a bladder and some beer works wonders

I have attached a picture of what I use in case you wanted to try something else. A "MetroPCS" standalone cell phone battery charger I purchased from eBay for a whopping $3.50 shipped. I took it apart and ran clipleads out of the original contact holes to charge any battery with tabs. The circuit inside is fairly simple, only 3 or so transistors if I remember correctly. The power for the charger comes from a mini USB connector, which by USB standards can only provide 5V at 500mA max. I myself only used it for precharging batteries that were resting at a lower than my dad's Thunder Power TP-610C liked it, but I made the mistake of letting it fully charge a battery once because I left it unattended for too long. The battery wasn't hurt, but it ended up getting charged to 4.23V, which I wasn't too comfortable with. The charger was extremely reliable, precharging 15+ parallel strings and not complaining about any of them, or getting hot to my knowledge...the problem comes with the tolerances of the charger not being close enough to 4.2V for my liking.

Ha..
Why don'tcha hook 10 cells up in serial and test them all at once?

Seems like that would save ya some time

That's how i'm testing my lipo.. two 5s, so 10s all discharged in one go. I have a halogen light array doing the discharging, but for those, the internal iCharger discharge should work well.