Over the years, my physical condition has deteriated to such an extent that my workshop is now a store room with boxes of old computer parts and such. I still play with electronics, and watch your video's as they are released, when they do not come fast enough, I watch your older videos. So when you are talking of plugging the wrong power supply into a device, it reminded me of my last tragic error. I was trying to get an old external DVD device to work, it has been in the piles of crap in the back room for a couple of years. When it did not respond to the USB on my laptop, which is now my primary computer because of my condition, I decided to use the 5 volt power jack on the back of the device to add power in case the problem was low power on my USB plug. So I reached down beside my chair into a pile of electronics that now covers the floor on one side of my chair, and found a 2.1mm plug that I thought was 5 volts, and plugged it into the DVD device. My laptop (not even 1 year of age, ah such a young device) shut down in a flash. This, of course worried me a bit, so I removed that plug, and traced it back to a 12 volt wall wart! When I restarted my laptop I was very happy to find that it came back with what appeared to be no effect, that is until I tried to use either of the USB ports on that side of the machine! While they still gave out 5 volts, the data bus was dead, and they now serve only as charging ports. Thankfully there is still one USB 3 port on the other side of the laptop that was not effected. Still, stupid mistake that I shall suffer for till my next laptop purchase, and to tell the truth, it SUCKS, I was always using at least 2 if not all 3 of the ports for different jobs. Ah well shit happens I guess. Thanks a million for the great videos!
It's good that NiMH batteries can just sit on charge forever, it's exactly what my house phones do, and makes me feel slightly less bad about leaving one of my cheapo electric drills on charge for two weeks in the garage. I remember the bad old days of NiCd batteries and their 14 hour charge times. Stick 14 of the damn things in your RC car, play with it for 20 minutes and then put it back on charge until the next day. Fantastic.
When I bought my first Ni-MH cells to replace alkaline in my camera, I built a dumb charger. Used a transistor and a potentiometer to vary current and marked the knob for the number of cells. Charged at about C/10 so I could just trickle charge all night and forget about it. Still have it as a backup charger if my Rayovac smart charger dies. Might I mention Rayovac has very good batteries and chargers, but Eneloop is still better. :D
@@william_2610 I can recall my dad putting NiCd batteries in their first digital compact camera (somewhere around the 2000's, I think) after having charged them for the 14 hours someone already mentioned, but after having taken 10 pictures the camera reported empty batteries and he reviewed the manual that pressed the user not to use "commonly available NiCd batteries, but the newer type denoted as "Ni-Mh". It was weird in a way to see how power hungry a device was that it needed a new type of batteries after having used NiCd for a reasonable amount of years.
Don't be so hard on those sellers. Of course it has auto thermal shut off, just probably at a little more elevated temperature than you would like. Like when the circuit board bursts into flames, I'm sure it will stop charging...eventually... .
You are correct that the cell resistance goes up at the end of charge, but it is called negative delta-V charge termination because the V that is measured by the delta V chargers is not charge voltage but cell output voltage. They stop charging for a bit at regular intervals and measure the cell voltage. They compare the measured voltage to the previous measured value to get the delta-V. When its lower than it was last time they checked, you got a negative delta-V and charge is stopped. Great videos. I love them.
The 80F0308AD32 is an 8032 MCU. The letters and numbers in between denote the precise model from the manufacturer. F probably means flash memory instead of OTP which is often denoted with a C. The 0308 may be 3k ram 8k flash.
Scotts been playing a game called Shenzhen i/o based on programming microcontrollers to flash LEDs - it's hard to know who's channel you're on some days.
The pulsing you are seeing is the delta V test, yes. Switch off the charge, connect to load (possibly the through hole resistors) and measure the voltage.
I've got one of these, I messaged you asking why it seems to make a ticket noise when it charges and you got back to me. It's good to see you doing a video about it :)
Nice placement of the inductor :-). The hardware designer probably measured the distance of the inductor to the transistor in the datasheet on a 27" inch screen and then decided to place it on the other side of the pcb.
I just got one of these Vapex chargers (VTE8000). I have been having a small problem with it that I have just been investigating. Certain combinations of cell cause the unit to crash and restart repeatedly. I thought it was one specific rogue battery at one point, but in the end it seems to be power supply rated. The charger is split into two banks of 4 cells, with each bank allocated 2A, for 4A total current load. With just one cell in each bank It would, depending on which cells were being used at the time, keep crashing. The PSU it came with is rated 18V 0.5A (so 9W), which is precisely what the input is quoted as on the label for the charger. Which I would say is a bit close. So I wire it to my bench power supply, set it to 18V and max 1A, and try it out. And lo and behold it works perfectly. But the current, I notice, does peak *above* 500mA. I just saw (briefly) 557mA. In fact, I have even seen my bench supply briefly think about switching to CC mode as it hits the 1A current limit I have set, so it seems to have some pretty nasty peak demands. So important thing to note when buying these Vapex units: The PSU they come with is not powerful enough to run the unit properly. It is worth investing in a suitable replacement power supply rated, I would say, at least 750mA (or even 1A+) at 18V (if you can find one).
Update: A 12V 2A supply I happened to have lying around seems to function nicely. I don't know why they chose 18V for the supply - seems a bit of an odd value. Maybe I'm risking melting a trace that's not rated for the ~750mA this is drawing at the moment, but so far all seems fine. I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if the Magic Smoke™ escapes. Also with 18V the unit "peeps" at me - probably from a vibrating inductor. With 12V it merely clicks faintly if you listen carefully.
One strange thing I do notice with the supplied power supply... INPUT: 100-240V ~50/60Hz 0.5A OUTPUT: 18V DC 0.5A 0.5A in, 0.5A out...? Someone is not telling me the right things here...
11:21 I suspect that eventually, all Warranties will include a Clause stating: If this product enters Big Clive's (of bigclive.com) home/shop the Warranty is INSTANTLY Void...
I have had the same problem of different chargers/power supplies with the same plugs...I solved the problem by putting a bit of heat shrink on each of the plug ends to warn myself. They are basically color-coded now and easily identifiable.
Hi Clive, like you I have one of these which has worked flawlessly since purchase. But always reassuring to have your take on it . Many thanks for sharing, kindest regards from Bonnie West do Scotland. Joe.
That charger is adorable! I do like my torches and so I like my chargers apart from my second stupid MAHA which gets the batteries extremely hot just like yours. My favourites are a cute little 2 bay Samsung mains charger which looks identical to the Eneloop one and a Varta one that seems to do a good job and has a cool green LCD.
You would love the Powerex c9000 gives you charge current/ voltage and total, you can set the charge rate , also has many other options but I don't think it has heat sensor .
I was looking for a new charger because I have been buying a few 18650 batteries lately and wanted to have a good charger for them. I came across the XTAR 4C at a good price and it seemed to do (on paper) what I wanted it to do and that is charge both Li-ion and NiMH batteries (Panasonic 3400mAh 18650 and Panasonic (formerly Sanyo) Eneloop Pro AA and AAA batteries). It has four slots and charges both types of batteries at the same time but what impressed me was that as opposed to other chargers the batteries didn't even become warm, let alone hot. I liked it so much that I decided to buy two, two slot, XTAR VC2 Plus Master battery chargers as well. It would be interesting to see or hear your opinion of them
I was checking voltages inside my 110V wall 4 port NiMh Energizer charger and strait off the AC voltage coming into the board I get 5.5V ACV. Positive goes 1st to a resistor which I assume is used as a fuse beacuase it has heat shrink on it. Then both positive and negative leads go 1st to 2 diodes each. One positive and one negative with some electrolytic caps close by and a transformer.. Do you have any idea how voltage could be dropped that much soon as 110 hits the board? This model is the CHP41US. Wish I had a schematic.
I have one of those I bought some time ago, perhaps 18 months?... it has a blue backlight, but the older fixed plug 18v psu which I prefer. One thing I would say is that my interpretation of the charge current in my instructions is that it is set up as 2 separate 4 cell chargers... you can get 2A charge on 2 cells, but you would need to place them in slot 1 and slot 5. If you put 4 cells in slots 1-4 you get 500ma, but if you put those 4 cells into slots 1,2 & 5,6 you would get 1A charging... because that would be 2 cells in each set of 4.
10:29 Since I'm starting to do more projects with Arduino and similar hardware, I've been reading up on ways to prevent things crashing in a dangerous fashion, like that Maplin charger you described. I'm thinking this would be a good application for a watchdog timer, which I only just discovered they package in nice little SMD chips.
I used temperature to determine the end of the charge in my homebrew charger, I read it's a nice practice. What's your opinion, Clive? Is it all that necessary to have few charge cutoff parameters or 1 will do? I guess more is better in terms of redundancy, but my charger seems to work really well only with the temperature cutoff: cell got warm - switch to trickle charge mode.
I would personally recommend the 'XTar VP2' for Lithium cells and 'Ansmann Powerline 4 Pro' for NiMH ones. Both were _just_ the right side of £40 at the time I bought them--otherwise I would not have done so!--and I have been using them solidly for the last four years without any problems. All this despite feeding them pretty much exclusively crappy 'Ultrafire' 18650's and Aldi AA/AAA's.
LInksys routers used to run on 5v, now they run 12v, I fried a few because of it. Had to get a new one (upgraded to 802.11 AC) and it came with a 12v 4 amp supply, pretty hardcore for residential.
i use a NiteCore Digicharger D4 for everything from AAA to 26650. great charger with auto cut off and individual cell charging and you can charge mixed cells. only downside is that it only charges a max of 4 cells
I'm using an Opus BT-C3100, mainly because i also charge alot of 18650s and want to check them for their health too. For on the go i got that small eneloop charger hat sits directly in the socket and can hold 4 AA or AAA batteries. Both handle every battery independently, which was important for me.
I have one of the early Nimh smart chargers and it just slammed them at a constant voltage and fixed current. It always overheated the cells and false peaked. pulsing likely helps with that as well
Clive, would it be possible for you to do a review/recommendation/shootout of various NiMh chargers and recommend a nice cheap one with temperature sensing included? I want to increase the number of Eneloops I have on hand, but charging them four at a time is a bit of a pain.
I wonder how those duracell fast chargers with a fan worked... I think the special fast charge batteries were rayovaks, they had a penchant for putting out custom proprietary batteries which died on the market because of cost.
Just a wild guess, but the processor might be a custom variant of the Intel 8008 family with AD input pins. The 8008 family has a low transistor count and (my guess) cheap licensing. So they would be a good embedded processor, and they are very reliable.
As far as I know, the dip in voltage is because the bubbles act as an insulator and momentarily reduce the available surface of the electrode. I've had a Hahnel Ventra crash and absolutely boil a set of black eneloops to the point that their labels formed blisters. Amazingly, they still have some capacity left.
Hi Clive, I have a USB car charger with 2 sockets. 1 socket claiming to be 1A and the other 2A. Unfortunately when I plugged in 2 x 2A USB testers is heated up to 200C and the diodes exploded. The actual draw was 3A @ 3.5V. Could some sort of protection be added in there?
Interesting take on one of these fast chargers. It's amazing how simple they are, too. I'm curious, what's your take on some of the more complex chargers? You said you use lots of batteries, so presumably, you tend to favor speed over battery charge cycles. I've got one of them at home - a Maha MH-C9000 - that charges up to four AA/AAA batteries at a time, but has a rather surprising amount of flexibility, going from being able to do fast charging (it will let you set the charging current) to doing slow charges, and this sucker can even bring back NiMHs that would be stone dead in any other charger (especially the cheap ones). Plus, from what I know, each battery slot is its own circuit - it can charge different batteries at different speeds, and it even does stuff like let you set the battery capacity precisely so that you don't over- (or under)-charge it, and can even test the battery's capacity so that you know if it's truly shot or not. I wouldn't mind seeing a teardown and analysis of something like that. Owing to its relatively high level of complexity compared to those chargers, it's no doubt got more impressive internal gubbins, as well. They don't cost too much online - I see them for about $50 USD on Amazon. Only problem with it: The LEDs in the panel for the thing are INCREDIBLY bright. And there's no way to dim them! I tend to put something on top of the LED readout if it's in use, as otherwise, it is very literally a bedroom nightlight.
Clive, just a quick note to say that I have an identical charger and the 8 charging bays are split into two groups of 4. Both banks of 4 charge at 2A each, so 1 cell would take the full 2A, 2 cells would be charged at 1A each and 4 cells would take 500mA each. The instruction leaflet and label on the bottom talk of "right" and "Left" sides. I notice you have Eneloops and Recyko cells - do you prefer one brand over the other or are they (as I suspect) pretty much the same?
The idea behind -dV-Turnoff is this: As the cell becomes fully carged, more and more energy is converted into heat. This in turn raises the internal resistance of the battery. When you measure the voltage under load (as with all those batteries) this will result in an decrease of the voltage. This change will be small (10-50mV) but it is clearly detectable. For those measurements the charging current will always be turned off. BTW: 2A is way too much for those poor eneloops. They are quite good batteries (a use about 90 of them), but to keep them happy I usually charge with 200mA, but never more than 500mA. The recommand fast charge for NiMH batteries is 4h at C/3. With white AA eneloops that comes to 650mA.
Hahaaa, I was just charging batteries on a Lidl Tronic TLG 1000 C5. Its very big/bulky & batteries get quite hot sometimes )-8But it kind-of tells you if its pre charging, refrexhing or charging, bit like the other one you showed.So the question? is the heath check thing worth looking for on a charger or does your new charger a good enough job?
11:20 - "...warranty now void." Not a big problem seeing as BigClive could fix just about anything wrong with it that the warranty would cover. :) And probably use higher-quality components in the process.
looks like the SunLabz 12-Bay/Slot SMART Battery Charger , which is for the USA, the Vapex doesn't look like I can find it in the USA. but they look similar Blue backlight , indicator (except it has the discharge option which I can never understand fully, and doesn't seem to like 1. discharging 2. certain batteries )
The processor was produced by ABOV Semiconductor and has been discontinued. It had 8K bytes of FLASH, 512 bytes of RAM, 8/16-bit timer/counter, watchdog timer, 10-bit A/D converter, 8-bit Serial Input/Output, UART, buzzer driving port, 10-bit PWM output and on-chip oscillator and clock circuitry. It also has ONP, noise filter, PFD for improving noise immunity. www.abov.co.kr/en/index.php?Depth1=3&Depth2=4&Depth3=1&Depth4=1&Item=MC80F0304 I have found that sometimes searching at google.com.uk will return better results for components than google.com Thanks for the videos, I really enjoy them.
ABOV is a Korean semiconductor manufacturer. The 80F0308AD32 is an EOL (End Of Line) 32bit MCU. Other than that I, like you, am at a loss to find much information.
Probably already been said, but I think the mystery MCU is from ABOV Semiconductors "ABOV SEMICONDUCTOR 8-BIT SINGLE-CHIP MICROCONTROLLERS MC80F0304/0308/0316 MC80C0304/0308/0316" "The MC80F0304/0308/0316 is advanced CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH. This is a powerful microcontroller which provides a highly flexible and cost effective solution to many embedded control applications. This provides the following features : 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH, 512 bytes of RAM, 8/16-bit timer/counter, watchdog timer, 10-bit A/D converter, 8-bit Serial Input/Output, UART, buzzer driving port, 10-bit PWM output and on-chip oscillator and clock circuitry. It also has ONP, noise filter, PFD for improving noise immunity. In addition, the MC80F0304/0308/0316 supports power saving modes to reduce power consumption."
I used a buck converter and tested these down to 8v and they cut off around 6 to 9v so they have a lot of wiggle room mine works from about 6 to 8v up to about 18 to 20v maximum it came with a 12v 1A power supply that actually can deliver up to about just over 2 amps before it cuts out into protection and cycles on and off slowly. and the charger only draws about 0.43A maximum from the power supply at 12v! so not bad!
I have one that not only as all kinds of protective circuitry etc., it actually has test modes (tests can take over 24 hours) to tell you how degraded the cell is,.... and it even has a repair mode than can "fix" damaged cells to some degree.
Negative delta V comes from the battery heating up. Battery's internal resistance drops when they get hot and lower internal resistance means lower voltage on battery terminals. In a way -deltaV is temperature detection. I'm guessing real temperature monitoring is useful only when pushing huge amounts of current through battery and by the time voltage drops, the battery is already fried.
Data sheets. If you can find your component on RS Components site, they most often have a direct link to the data sheet. No, I don't work for them. Or anyone now I come to think about it. Been wondering why I don't go out I the morning.
Hi Clive, been a watcher for short time and like your presentations, i'm having problems charging Ni-mh AA and AAA batteries. I have bought several different brands of batteries recently and a new charger which I would like you to review, It's an XTAR VC4, the problem I'm having is that none of my new or old batteries reach any where near the MAH stated on batts according to this charger any info would be great.
If you buy high quality batteries they should reach their target mAh, but many being sold on eBay have inflated figures. I tested some 3000mAh cells at just 150mAh capacity. The weight of the cells is also a clue. Some fast chargers also terminate the charge far too soon because they are over sensitive to voltage transients on the cell during normal charging.
your bang on about the Ebay batteries very light and yes only averaged 95-150mah on 3000mah. trying Enloop and Energizer at the moment purported to be the best for money. but they haven't quite got there either close but could be better i think. possibly the caharger I spoke of XTAR-VC4.
Hi Clive, I am interested about lithium AA batteries, I bought a well known brand packet of 4, they read 1.8v per cell, I imagine they have some sort of buck converter to drop the voltage. If that is the case I wonder if they hold 1.8v for the majority of the batteries life? and secondly if they could be recharged what is difference in the chemistry or circuitry between rechargeable and non rechargeable? thanks
The primary lithium cells do have a voltage closer to 1.5V as standard and can not be recharged. Their main advantages are their capacity, storage life and the ability to operate to much lower temperatures than other cells.
I have to speak up about these vapex chargers. I have the EXACT same charger, and bought it about 4-5 years ago. It is backlit (blue). It also has your older style moulded plug, so it looks like I have the older version. Shortly after buying it the backlight failed which I found (and fixed) to be a dodgy solder point. *so check yours for dodgy soldering in the backlight!!!!* and you might find that it should have been backlit all this time! The main beef I have with the Vapex charger is that batteries charged in it DO NOT last as long as they do when charged in my (much MUCH older) uniross wall-plug-charger. (the round top type with the 4 battery slots integrated into the heavy plug). They LOOK like they are charging properly, with the climbing LED and the time they take, but even leaving them in for days doesn't seem to make any difference. I also found that AAA batteries DO NOT fit properly in the slots as they have to be angled downwards and the spring contacts do not reach the battery terminals properly. Overall I am disappointed with it and wondered if you had an answer to why they don't last as long??
Older batteries tend to have a higher internal resistance that causes early charge termination on "intelligent" chargers.. The only way to get full capacity out of older or lower-capacity cells is to charge them on a dumb charger which charges them continuously at a lower current.
Thanks for the response! but I do use recently bought batteries not old ones. I edited my question as you replied! Also check your older charger for a dodgy solder point by the screen as mine is backlit!!
Not with some scraps from an old laptop LCD like the diffuser layers and the reflective backing. All you need then is some LEDs to use as an edge light and a way to mount and power them. No that wouldn't be too hard.
Would be cool if you could change the LED back-light to something brighter, or a different colour. Still, it would be nice to charge batteries a little quicker for the deercams I use for my other channel, "Candid Deercam". The instructions say only use primary cells (alkaline), but they get expensive.
Ive seen too many "smart" chargers fail, or become useless due to charging error. The last one i had to repair had exploded for no real reason, it was inside a fancy phillips electric razor, just a burned pcb where the charger used to be. It was bypassed and i made a simple constant current charger in an external box the size of a matchbox, it was setup for a 10 hr low current charge time, no hot battery :-D. The supprise is: it worked better than the fancy one ever did and the battery had more capacity. Sometimes simple is the best :-). Lithium batterys would need slighty more complex a circuit, but its possible.
I'd never thought about embedded things crashing before my wireless headphones with a software on/off switch got stuck. They were impossible to turn off but there was also no audio. Thankfully, there was a special trick with the charger that reset the micro.
Clive - have you ever seen the 'Maha MH-C9000 Wizard One Fast Smart Charger' (sometimes Powerex instead of Maha)? It's hugely popular on the Candle Power forum, and I'm sure a look inside that would be a very popular and interesting video.
That would be interesting. I have one of those and it's rock solid and will charge 4 cells at up to 2A. AFAIK it undercharges because it apparently terminates on voltage before reaching -dV or temperature most of the time and you need to leave it do a 2 hour trickle top off.
It works like those fast chargers for electric vehicles. Up to 90% in no time … and the rest is charged very carefully (although the charger already displays "DONE").
Coolkeys2009 my BC 700 with 12v supply does a good job but my later faster one with lower voltage power supply makes the batteries very hot. Are there clones around that are bad?
For nearly a decade now, I've been using a $90 MAHA MH-C808M AA - AAA - C - D, 8 cell charger and I'm pretty happy with it. It's a little primitive in that it doesn't do cell capacity or voltage like the MH-C9000 & BC-700, but it has eight independent charging circuits, soft and rapid charge, and deep discharge/recharge conditioning. It also has a big chunky 18v, 2000ma DIN style power brick. Before I bought the MH-C808M I had spent nearly $90 on several horribly cheap no name chargers that destroyed about a dozen of my NiMH AA cells. I finally broke down and spent the money on a quality unit and it has served me well. I also have (8) 10,000mAh D cells that I used to use for various lanterns, and this charger was the only one on the market that could charge all 8 cells in one pass. All the others would require you to restart the charging cycle to complete the charge, because the capacity of these cells is so high.
I use to buy Vapex battery's and they where spot on current wise, a good buy, but I get those Enloop jobs now because there internal resistance is so low they run the camera well.
I have one of the other ones (with 4 battery bays) that you showed, but it's an older version, because the plug pack gives out 3V at 2.8A - it was bought in 2011, so it isn't really new. But I like it because I don't like shortening the life span of my batteries by fast-charging them with 2A, I usually charge them at the lowest setting (I think it's 250mA), and also I often only charge 1 or 2 batteries in it, so the Vapex would be "too big" for me. I also noticed my charger showing too many mAh going into the batteries, but only in the third slot, so the other ones seem fairly accurate (at least considering what the capacity of the cells I'm charging is supposed to be). I think I'll stay with my charger for now. Why again was it that the older style power supply caused problems?
I've never heard of anything like +dV termination. Furthermore, low self-discharge NiMHs get damaged slowly with trickle-charging so a proper -dV termination charger is ideal for them. Temperature cell monitoring (for +dT termination) is obvious on a charger as there are metal fingers contacting the sides of the cell to measure its temperature. In general, the logic for a proper -dV/dT charger is lot harder to design compared to LiIon. LiIon doesn't require the detection of sudden voltage or temperature deltas, you just apply a constant current until you measure 4.2V, and once you reach that, you switch to a constant voltage of 4.2V, and terminate once the current reaches 1/10 of the original charge current. A timer for terminating after 8-9 hours and overvoltage protection with a comparator (in case the IC logic locks up for some reason) are good o have. Regarding -dV, it requires a cell to be charged at high current (at least 0.5C), otherwise the voltage drop after charge is complete is very minor and the IC will not detect it. This 8 cell charger looks like it time-shares current between slots and I wouldn't trust it to terminate correctly with multiple cells. I can only trust chargers that HJK from www.lygte-info.dk has tested.
You can not tell the state of charge by the voltage on Lithium ion cells. You use either a custom solution columb counter / battery model alogrithm, or an implemented chip that does that for you.
Clive what are your thoughts on these chargers that apparently re-charge alkaline batteries? I've never used one but someone was asking me about them the other day, wondered if you'd disembowelled one to check out yet? It was always a no-no but maybe things have changed?
It can be done, but you're right it generally is a no no, they're prone to leaking no matter how careful you are re-charging, also the capacity tends to drop off quite dramatically after a few cycles, you can probably get MAXIMUM 10 (rapidly shortening) cycles out of an Alkaline cell before it basically leaks acid all over your charger and makes a huge mess.
Unlike the NiMh cells alkaline cells can't recombine the gas generated during charging, so the cells will often vent and damage the seals resulting in cell leakage. The amount of capacity you can get back from an alkaline cell is very poor. It's much cheaper and safer to just go with NiMh cells.
Ah nothing much has changed over the years i guess, i noticed they did state you could only recharge them 20 times max, clearly they know they are going to leak & crap out quite quickly. I'll let my friend know to avoid them, many thanks for the replies, oh & the chap with the Russian? name, i think it was more to do with re-cycling rather than saving money.
Found a datasheet on the 80F0308. According to the datasheet, "The MC80F0304/0308/0316 is advanced CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH". Here's a link to that datasheet: archive.compgeke.com/PDF/IC%20Datasheets/MC80F0308-ABOV%20SEMICONDUCTOR.pdf
The good ol' Buddy L Super Charger! My family owned one in the 90s and after I read a story about Cubans 'recharging' hearing aid batteries by plugging them into a socket I got weirdly fixated on remembering what ours was called.
Neat. A diode and resistive divider. I built a similar dodgy charger for a tiny NiMh battery pack I used in a very early use of a blue LED. (In my hard hat). I went the full hog and had two LEDs. One for standby and one for charging when a pack was plugged in.
I like this one, but if you don't mind a longer charge time the best chargers are actually the traditional slow ones, although they can literally take a day or more to fully charge some of the higher capacity cells.
Thank you. I was looking at the all singing all dancing ones, with refresh and all that, but if they serve no real extra purpose. Just one other question. Does it still extend the battery life to charge lithium (phone) batteries at a slower rate. I.e would I extend the life of a mobile phone battery by charging it at 500ma rather than 2000ma, using a lower current charger than the one that came with it. The charger above looks good. Will scope it out. Thanks again.
Interesting you charge so many cells at once... is that for work? Because at home I never run out of more than 4 cells at once, so I just have a cache of 4 AA and 4 AAA eneloops (low-discharge), and swap and then pop the depleted ones in the charger right away
Karl Baron In my band we always have one of these maxed out with an extra 9v charge section too. Wireless mics, wireless guitar packs and battery headphone amps. Other than that, I don't often need to charge more than four AA at home either.
I suspect he, like I, just has a quite large stock of batteries and quite a few appliances that use them. I just toss my depleted batteries into my 'discharged' container and charge them in batches when I run low. Personally, I run thru batteries with my various flashlights I use for hiking fairly quickly, so there's always a few in the pile.
I only use NiteCore chargers, been using them for years for everything from AAAs to 26650s. Never had anything wrong happen ever, because of that I feel safer using those.
I misread the Title as "Vape 8 times faster" and got really excited only to see that I was wrong. Still, that sounds like something Bigclive would do.. maybe.. some day..
Calltheampulamp Ah okay, that's another story. It's tuned to pass airplane certificates. The currently best cell is Panasonic NCR18650B, 3400 mAh. Dunno if it also passed airplane certification.
Over the years, my physical condition has deteriated to such an extent that my workshop is now a store room with boxes of old computer parts and such. I still play with electronics, and watch your video's as they are released, when they do not come fast enough, I watch your older videos. So when you are talking of plugging the wrong power supply into a device, it reminded me of my last tragic error. I was trying to get an old external DVD device to work, it has been in the piles of crap in the back room for a couple of years. When it did not respond to the USB on my laptop, which is now my primary computer because of my condition, I decided to use the 5 volt power jack on the back of the device to add power in case the problem was low power on my USB plug. So I reached down beside my chair into a pile of electronics that now covers the floor on one side of my chair, and found a 2.1mm plug that I thought was 5 volts, and plugged it into the DVD device. My laptop (not even 1 year of age, ah such a young device) shut down in a flash. This, of course worried me a bit, so I removed that plug, and traced it back to a 12 volt wall wart! When I restarted my laptop I was very happy to find that it came back with what appeared to be no effect, that is until I tried to use either of the USB ports on that side of the machine! While they still gave out 5 volts, the data bus was dead, and they now serve only as charging ports. Thankfully there is still one USB 3 port on the other side of the laptop that was not effected. Still, stupid mistake that I shall suffer for till my next laptop purchase, and to tell the truth, it SUCKS, I was always using at least 2 if not all 3 of the ports for different jobs. Ah well shit happens I guess. Thanks a million for the great videos!
It's good that NiMH batteries can just sit on charge forever, it's exactly what my house phones do, and makes me feel slightly less bad about leaving one of my cheapo electric drills on charge for two weeks in the garage.
I remember the bad old days of NiCd batteries and their 14 hour charge times. Stick 14 of the damn things in your RC car, play with it for 20 minutes and then put it back on charge until the next day. Fantastic.
"Good"
When I bought my first Ni-MH cells to replace alkaline in my camera, I built a dumb charger. Used a transistor and a potentiometer to vary current and marked the knob for the number of cells. Charged at about C/10 so I could just trickle charge all night and forget about it. Still have it as a backup charger if my Rayovac smart charger dies. Might I mention Rayovac has very good batteries and chargers, but Eneloop is still better. :D
No, the BAD old days as NiCd *SUCKED*
George Smith I still have some ancient NiCd's in my drawer, tiny capacity and take an age to charge.
@@william_2610 I can recall my dad putting NiCd batteries in their first digital compact camera (somewhere around the 2000's, I think) after having charged them for the 14 hours someone already mentioned, but after having taken 10 pictures the camera reported empty batteries and he reviewed the manual that pressed the user not to use "commonly available NiCd batteries, but the newer type denoted as "Ni-Mh".
It was weird in a way to see how power hungry a device was that it needed a new type of batteries after having used NiCd for a reasonable amount of years.
Don't be so hard on those sellers. Of course it has auto thermal shut off, just probably at a little more elevated temperature than you would like. Like when the circuit board bursts into flames, I'm sure it will stop charging...eventually... .
That did go through my mind. The thermal protection might be the power supply overheating.
you sure I thought it was supposed to be the breaker tripping?
You are correct that the cell resistance goes up at the end of charge, but it is called negative delta-V charge termination because the V that is measured by the delta V chargers is not charge voltage but cell output voltage.
They stop charging for a bit at regular intervals and measure the cell voltage. They compare the measured voltage to the previous measured value to get the delta-V. When its lower than it was last time they checked, you got a negative delta-V and charge is stopped.
Great videos. I love them.
The 80F0308AD32 is an 8032 MCU. The letters and numbers in between denote the precise model from the manufacturer. F probably means flash memory instead of OTP which is often denoted with a C. The 0308 may be 3k ram 8k flash.
I've been watching too many Scott Manley videos. Every time Clive says "Delta-V" my brain insists he's talking about rocketry.
IKR?!
Scotts been playing a game called Shenzhen i/o based on programming microcontrollers to flash LEDs - it's hard to know who's channel you're on some days.
ikr :P
LOL I was thinking the same. "Wait are we sending these batteries to space?"
Glad it's not just me.
The pulsing you are seeing is the delta V test, yes. Switch off the charge, connect to load (possibly the through hole resistors) and measure the voltage.
I've got one of these, I messaged you asking why it seems to make a ticket noise when it charges and you got back to me. It's good to see you doing a video about it :)
Bought one of these earlier in the year and I'm very happy with it, as I am with the chocolate witch I picked up today.
+Matt Tester a Witch with an identity crisis though :)
Nice placement of the inductor :-). The hardware designer probably measured the distance of the inductor to the transistor in the datasheet on a 27" inch screen and then decided to place it on the other side of the pcb.
I just got one of these Vapex chargers (VTE8000). I have been having a small problem with it that I have just been investigating.
Certain combinations of cell cause the unit to crash and restart repeatedly. I thought it was one specific rogue battery at one point, but in the end it seems to be power supply rated.
The charger is split into two banks of 4 cells, with each bank allocated 2A, for 4A total current load. With just one cell in each bank It would, depending on which cells were being used at the time, keep crashing.
The PSU it came with is rated 18V 0.5A (so 9W), which is precisely what the input is quoted as on the label for the charger. Which I would say is a bit close. So I wire it to my bench power supply, set it to 18V and max 1A, and try it out. And lo and behold it works perfectly. But the current, I notice, does peak *above* 500mA. I just saw (briefly) 557mA. In fact, I have even seen my bench supply briefly think about switching to CC mode as it hits the 1A current limit I have set, so it seems to have some pretty nasty peak demands.
So important thing to note when buying these Vapex units: The PSU they come with is not powerful enough to run the unit properly. It is worth investing in a suitable replacement power supply rated, I would say, at least 750mA (or even 1A+) at 18V (if you can find one).
Update:
A 12V 2A supply I happened to have lying around seems to function nicely. I don't know why they chose 18V for the supply - seems a bit of an odd value. Maybe I'm risking melting a trace that's not rated for the ~750mA this is drawing at the moment, but so far all seems fine. I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if the Magic Smoke™ escapes.
Also with 18V the unit "peeps" at me - probably from a vibrating inductor. With 12V it merely clicks faintly if you listen carefully.
One strange thing I do notice with the supplied power supply...
INPUT: 100-240V ~50/60Hz 0.5A
OUTPUT: 18V DC 0.5A
0.5A in, 0.5A out...? Someone is not telling me the right things here...
11:21 I suspect that eventually, all Warranties will include a Clause stating:
If this product enters Big Clive's (of bigclive.com) home/shop the Warranty is INSTANTLY Void...
I have had the same problem of different chargers/power supplies with the same plugs...I solved the problem by putting a bit of heat shrink on each of the plug ends to warn myself.
They are basically color-coded now and easily identifiable.
Hi Clive, like you I have one of these which has worked flawlessly since purchase. But always reassuring to have your take on it . Many thanks for sharing, kindest regards from Bonnie West do Scotland. Joe.
I can stop watching this channel. Awesome!
That charger is adorable! I do like my torches and so I like my chargers apart from my second stupid MAHA which gets the batteries extremely hot just like yours. My favourites are a cute little 2 bay Samsung mains charger which looks identical to the Eneloop one and a Varta one that seems to do a good job and has a cool green LCD.
Clive I'm off my game today and a bit sick.
You taking things to bits is chicken soup for the soul.
You would love the Powerex c9000 gives you charge current/ voltage and total, you can set the charge rate , also has many other options but I don't think it has heat sensor .
I was looking for a new charger because I have been buying a few 18650 batteries lately and wanted to have a good charger for them. I came across the XTAR 4C at a good price and it seemed to do (on paper) what I wanted it to do and that is charge both Li-ion and NiMH batteries (Panasonic 3400mAh 18650 and Panasonic (formerly Sanyo) Eneloop Pro AA and AAA batteries).
It has four slots and charges both types of batteries at the same time but what impressed me was that as opposed to other chargers the batteries didn't even become warm, let alone hot.
I liked it so much that I decided to buy two, two slot, XTAR VC2 Plus Master battery chargers as well.
It would be interesting to see or hear your opinion of them
I was checking voltages inside my 110V wall 4 port NiMh Energizer charger and strait off the AC voltage coming into the board I get 5.5V ACV. Positive goes 1st to a resistor which I assume is used as a fuse beacuase it has heat shrink on it.
Then both positive and negative leads go 1st to 2 diodes each. One positive and one negative with some electrolytic caps close by and a transformer..
Do you have any idea how voltage could be dropped that much soon as 110 hits the board?
This model is the CHP41US. Wish I had a schematic.
I have one of those I bought some time ago, perhaps 18 months?... it has a blue backlight, but the older fixed plug 18v psu which I prefer.
One thing I would say is that my interpretation of the charge current in my instructions is that it is set up as 2 separate 4 cell chargers... you can get 2A charge on 2 cells, but you would need to place them in slot 1 and slot 5. If you put 4 cells in slots 1-4 you get 500ma, but if you put those 4 cells into slots 1,2 & 5,6 you would get 1A charging... because that would be 2 cells in each set of 4.
10:29 Since I'm starting to do more projects with Arduino and similar hardware, I've been reading up on ways to prevent things crashing in a dangerous fashion, like that Maplin charger you described. I'm thinking this would be a good application for a watchdog timer, which I only just discovered they package in nice little SMD chips.
I used temperature to determine the end of the charge in my homebrew charger, I read it's a nice practice. What's your opinion, Clive? Is it all that necessary to have few charge cutoff parameters or 1 will do? I guess more is better in terms of redundancy, but my charger seems to work really well only with the temperature cutoff: cell got warm - switch to trickle charge mode.
I actually like the temperature sensing termination. It's a shame these units don't use it.
I would personally recommend the 'XTar VP2' for Lithium cells and 'Ansmann Powerline 4 Pro' for NiMH ones. Both were _just_ the right side of £40 at the time I bought them--otherwise I would not have done so!--and I have been using them solidly for the last four years without any problems. All this despite feeding them pretty much exclusively crappy 'Ultrafire' 18650's and Aldi AA/AAA's.
Nice demonstration. Do they sell the Alkaline battery chargers in the UK?
LInksys routers used to run on 5v, now they run 12v, I fried a few because of it. Had to get a new one (upgraded to 802.11 AC) and it came with a 12v 4 amp supply, pretty hardcore for residential.
ka7500 and its analogs are commonly met in pc power supplies. Quite a nice chip. I'm going to build lab power supply based on one of them.
i use a NiteCore Digicharger D4 for everything from AAA to 26650. great charger with auto cut off and individual cell charging and you can charge mixed cells. only downside is that it only charges a max of 4 cells
I'm using an Opus BT-C3100, mainly because i also charge alot of 18650s and want to check them for their health too.
For on the go i got that small eneloop charger hat sits directly in the socket and can hold 4 AA or AAA batteries.
Both handle every battery independently, which was important for me.
Thanks for this review. I just bought one of those last month, so it's reassuring to know its a decent charger.
I have one of the early Nimh smart chargers and it just slammed them at a constant voltage and fixed current.
It always overheated the cells and false peaked.
pulsing likely helps with that as well
Hey Clive, would it be possible for you to look at one of those 30£ IP Cameras? Or is that not your area of interest? ~hdm
Clive, would it be possible for you to do a review/recommendation/shootout of various NiMh chargers and recommend a nice cheap one with temperature sensing included? I want to increase the number of Eneloops I have on hand, but charging them four at a time is a bit of a pain.
I wonder how those duracell fast chargers with a fan worked... I think the special fast charge batteries were rayovaks, they had a penchant for putting out custom proprietary batteries which died on the market because of cost.
Just a wild guess, but the processor might be a custom variant of the Intel 8008 family with AD input pins. The 8008 family has a low transistor count and (my guess) cheap licensing. So they would be a good embedded processor, and they are very reliable.
As far as I know, the dip in voltage is because the bubbles act as an insulator and momentarily reduce the available surface of the electrode.
I've had a Hahnel Ventra crash and absolutely boil a set of black eneloops to the point that their labels formed blisters. Amazingly, they still have some capacity left.
Hi Clive, I have a USB car charger with 2 sockets. 1 socket claiming to be 1A and the other 2A. Unfortunately when I plugged in 2 x 2A USB testers is heated up to 200C and the diodes exploded. The actual draw was 3A @ 3.5V. Could some sort of protection be added in there?
The "unknown" chip is probably an ABOV semiconductor MC80F0308, a singe-chip 8-bit microcontroller. Google will provide a datasheet.
Interesting take on one of these fast chargers. It's amazing how simple they are, too.
I'm curious, what's your take on some of the more complex chargers? You said you use lots of batteries, so presumably, you tend to favor speed over battery charge cycles. I've got one of them at home - a Maha MH-C9000 - that charges up to four AA/AAA batteries at a time, but has a rather surprising amount of flexibility, going from being able to do fast charging (it will let you set the charging current) to doing slow charges, and this sucker can even bring back NiMHs that would be stone dead in any other charger (especially the cheap ones).
Plus, from what I know, each battery slot is its own circuit - it can charge different batteries at different speeds, and it even does stuff like let you set the battery capacity precisely so that you don't over- (or under)-charge it, and can even test the battery's capacity so that you know if it's truly shot or not.
I wouldn't mind seeing a teardown and analysis of something like that. Owing to its relatively high level of complexity compared to those chargers, it's no doubt got more impressive internal gubbins, as well. They don't cost too much online - I see them for about $50 USD on Amazon.
Only problem with it: The LEDs in the panel for the thing are INCREDIBLY bright. And there's no way to dim them! I tend to put something on top of the LED readout if it's in use, as otherwise, it is very literally a bedroom nightlight.
Clive, just a quick note to say that I have an identical charger and the 8 charging bays are split into two groups of 4. Both banks of 4 charge at 2A each, so 1 cell would take the full 2A, 2 cells would be charged at 1A each and 4 cells would take 500mA each. The instruction leaflet and label on the bottom talk of "right" and "Left" sides. I notice you have Eneloops and Recyko cells - do you prefer one brand over the other or are they (as I suspect) pretty much the same?
Every time you said delta v I thought of the aerospace version of delta v - possible change in velocity.
The idea behind -dV-Turnoff is this:
As the cell becomes fully carged, more and more energy is converted into heat. This in turn raises the internal resistance of the battery.
When you measure the voltage under load (as with all those batteries) this will result in an decrease of the voltage. This change will be small (10-50mV) but it is clearly detectable.
For those measurements the charging current will always be turned off.
BTW: 2A is way too much for those poor eneloops. They are quite good batteries (a use about 90 of them), but to keep them happy I usually charge with 200mA, but never more than 500mA.
The recommand fast charge for NiMH batteries is 4h at C/3. With white AA eneloops that comes to 650mA.
Hahaaa, I was just charging batteries on a Lidl Tronic TLG 1000 C5. Its very big/bulky & batteries get quite hot sometimes )-8But it kind-of tells you if its pre charging, refrexhing or charging, bit like the other one you showed.So the question? is the heath check thing worth looking for on a charger or does your new charger a good enough job?
I bet Clive will upgrade the LCD display to use a warm white LED.
11:20 - "...warranty now void." Not a big problem seeing as BigClive could fix just about anything wrong with it that the warranty would cover. :) And probably use higher-quality components in the process.
looks like the SunLabz 12-Bay/Slot SMART Battery Charger , which is for the USA, the Vapex doesn't look like I can find it in the USA. but they look similar Blue backlight , indicator (except it has the discharge option which I can never understand fully, and doesn't seem to like 1. discharging 2. certain batteries )
The processor was produced by ABOV Semiconductor and has been discontinued. It had 8K bytes of FLASH, 512 bytes of RAM, 8/16-bit timer/counter, watchdog timer, 10-bit A/D converter, 8-bit Serial Input/Output, UART, buzzer driving port, 10-bit PWM output and on-chip oscillator and clock circuitry. It also has ONP, noise filter, PFD for improving
noise immunity. www.abov.co.kr/en/index.php?Depth1=3&Depth2=4&Depth3=1&Depth4=1&Item=MC80F0304
I have found that sometimes searching at google.com.uk will return better results for components than google.com Thanks for the videos, I really enjoy them.
ABOV is a Korean semiconductor manufacturer. The 80F0308AD32 is an EOL (End Of Line) 32bit MCU. Other than that I, like you, am at a loss to find much information.
I think you mean 32 pin.
Its an 8 bit MCU.
Oops. Fingers are faster than the brain this AM. ;D
I use two of these to charge the batteries for my backpack sound system!
Hi, could you please make a tutorial on how to add a line-out to a sound bar please
Have you tested it of RFI with thath choke on the end of the long arial tracs !!
Hi Clive... sometimes they use diodes close to the battery clips to do ∆T... :)
Ah, the stereo in my dad's car crashed once. That was fun.
I taped it, and I might upload it one day to spite Toyota.
Probably already been said, but I think the mystery MCU is from ABOV Semiconductors
"ABOV SEMICONDUCTOR
8-BIT SINGLE-CHIP MICROCONTROLLERS
MC80F0304/0308/0316
MC80C0304/0308/0316"
"The MC80F0304/0308/0316 is advanced CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH. This is a powerful microcontroller
which provides a highly flexible and cost effective solution to many embedded control applications. This provides the following features
: 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH, 512 bytes of RAM, 8/16-bit timer/counter, watchdog timer, 10-bit A/D converter, 8-bit Serial Input/Output,
UART, buzzer driving port, 10-bit PWM output and on-chip oscillator and clock circuitry. It also has ONP, noise filter, PFD for improving
noise immunity. In addition, the MC80F0304/0308/0316 supports power saving modes to reduce power consumption."
I used a buck converter and tested these down to 8v and they cut off around 6 to 9v so they have a lot of wiggle room
mine works from about 6 to 8v up to about 18 to 20v maximum
it came with a 12v 1A power supply that actually can deliver up to about just over 2 amps before it cuts out into protection and cycles on and off slowly.
and the charger only draws about 0.43A maximum from the power supply at 12v! so not bad!
I bet you could make a back light for your old charger! there's a quick video idea for you - go on, give it a go
This is the second video in a row that you have slipped into a "Sean Connery" sophisticated lisp
I have one that not only as all kinds of protective circuitry etc., it actually has test modes (tests can take over 24 hours) to tell you how degraded the cell is,.... and it even has a repair mode than can "fix" damaged cells to some degree.
11:31 I thought that the board had a bunch of heatsinkless transistors. It was the pads...
Negative delta V comes from the battery heating up. Battery's internal resistance drops when they get hot and lower internal resistance means lower voltage on battery terminals. In a way -deltaV is temperature detection. I'm guessing real temperature monitoring is useful only when pushing huge amounts of current through battery and by the time voltage drops, the battery is already fried.
Data sheets. If you can find your component on RS Components site, they most often have a direct link to the data sheet. No, I don't work for them. Or anyone now I come to think about it. Been wondering why I don't go out I the morning.
Not sure why exactly, but id like to see you do a cheap Chinese toaster.
Such a brilliant channel. 👍
Hi Clive, been a watcher for short time and like your presentations, i'm having problems charging Ni-mh AA and AAA batteries.
I have bought several different brands of batteries recently and a new charger which I would like you to review, It's an XTAR VC4,
the problem I'm having is that none of my new or old batteries reach any where near the MAH stated on batts according to this charger any info would be great.
If you buy high quality batteries they should reach their target mAh, but many being sold on eBay have inflated figures. I tested some 3000mAh cells at just 150mAh capacity. The weight of the cells is also a clue.
Some fast chargers also terminate the charge far too soon because they are over sensitive to voltage transients on the cell during normal charging.
your bang on about the Ebay batteries very light and yes only averaged 95-150mah on 3000mah. trying Enloop and Energizer at the moment purported to be the best for money. but they haven't quite got there either close but could be better i think. possibly the caharger I spoke of XTAR-VC4.
Love the Videos bigclivedotcom keep up the great work.
That’s so much easier to get into than my Energizer Quick Charger
Hi Clive,
I am interested about lithium AA batteries, I bought a well known brand packet of 4, they read 1.8v per cell, I imagine they have some sort of buck converter to drop the voltage. If that is the case I wonder if they hold 1.8v for the majority of the batteries life? and secondly if they could be recharged what is difference in the chemistry or circuitry between rechargeable and non rechargeable?
thanks
The primary lithium cells do have a voltage closer to 1.5V as standard and can not be recharged. Their main advantages are their capacity, storage life and the ability to operate to much lower temperatures than other cells.
thank you
I have to speak up about these vapex chargers.
I have the EXACT same charger, and bought it about 4-5 years ago.
It is backlit (blue). It also has your older style moulded plug, so it looks like I have the older version.
Shortly after buying it the backlight failed which I found (and fixed) to be a dodgy solder point. *so check yours for dodgy soldering in the backlight!!!!* and you might find that it should have been backlit all this time!
The main beef I have with the Vapex charger is that batteries charged in it DO NOT last as long as they do when charged in my (much MUCH older) uniross wall-plug-charger. (the round top type with the 4 battery slots integrated into the heavy plug).
They LOOK like they are charging properly, with the climbing LED and the time they take, but even leaving them in for days doesn't seem to make any difference.
I also found that AAA batteries DO NOT fit properly in the slots as they have to be angled downwards and the spring contacts do not reach the battery terminals properly.
Overall I am disappointed with it and wondered if you had an answer to why they don't last as long??
Older batteries tend to have a higher internal resistance that causes early charge termination on "intelligent" chargers.. The only way to get full capacity out of older or lower-capacity cells is to charge them on a dumb charger which charges them continuously at a lower current.
Thanks for the response! but I do use recently bought batteries not old ones.
I edited my question as you replied!
Also check your older charger for a dodgy solder point by the screen as mine is backlit!!
I just placed an e-bay order for a couple of these chargers.
Can't be too hard to put your own LED backlight in the older charger can it?
Not with some scraps from an old laptop LCD like the diffuser layers and the reflective backing. All you need then is some LEDs to use as an edge light and a way to mount and power them. No that wouldn't be too hard.
Looks like we watch the same channel XD
TrollFaceTheMan
Haha, you've just gotta sub to the best channels. :)
Ikea has a cool nimh charger that holds 12 batteries at once, little slow though
I've not been to this channel in years
Would be cool if you could change the LED back-light to something brighter, or a different colour. Still, it would be nice to charge batteries a little quicker for the deercams I use for my other channel, "Candid Deercam". The instructions say only use primary cells (alkaline), but they get expensive.
Ive seen too many "smart" chargers fail, or become useless due to charging error.
The last one i had to repair had exploded for no real reason, it was inside a fancy phillips electric razor, just a burned pcb where the charger used to be.
It was bypassed and i made a simple constant current charger in an external box the size of a matchbox, it was setup for a 10 hr low current charge time, no hot battery :-D.
The supprise is: it worked better than the fancy one ever did and the battery had more capacity. Sometimes simple is the best :-).
Lithium batterys would need slighty more complex a circuit, but its possible.
I'd never thought about embedded things crashing before my wireless headphones with a software on/off switch got stuck. They were impossible to turn off but there was also no audio. Thankfully, there was a special trick with the charger that reset the micro.
Clive - have you ever seen the 'Maha MH-C9000 Wizard One Fast Smart Charger' (sometimes Powerex instead of Maha)? It's hugely popular on the Candle Power forum, and I'm sure a look inside that would be a very popular and interesting video.
That would be interesting. I have one of those and it's rock solid and will charge 4 cells at up to 2A. AFAIK it undercharges because it apparently terminates on voltage before reaching -dV or temperature most of the time and you need to leave it do a 2 hour trickle top off.
I have one of those that has killed many batteries or will not charge others. I bought a BC-700 that works much better.
It works like those fast chargers for electric vehicles. Up to 90% in no time … and the rest is charged very carefully (although the charger already displays "DONE").
Coolkeys2009 my BC 700 with 12v supply does a good job but my later faster one with lower voltage power supply makes the batteries very hot. Are there clones around that are bad?
For nearly a decade now, I've been using a $90 MAHA MH-C808M AA - AAA - C - D, 8 cell charger and I'm pretty happy with it. It's a little primitive in that it doesn't do cell capacity or voltage like the MH-C9000 & BC-700, but it has eight independent charging circuits, soft and rapid charge, and deep discharge/recharge conditioning. It also has a big chunky 18v, 2000ma DIN style power brick. Before I bought the MH-C808M I had spent nearly $90 on several horribly cheap no name chargers that destroyed about a dozen of my NiMH AA cells. I finally broke down and spent the money on a quality unit and it has served me well. I also have (8) 10,000mAh D cells that I used to use for various lanterns, and this charger was the only one on the market that could charge all 8 cells in one pass. All the others would require you to restart the charging cycle to complete the charge, because the capacity of these cells is so high.
Another awesome video. Thanks for tearing stuff apart so I don't have too
Ever dissected a Maha charger?
I use to buy Vapex battery's and they where spot on current wise, a good buy, but I get those Enloop jobs now because there internal resistance is so low they run the camera well.
I have one of the other ones (with 4 battery bays) that you showed, but it's an older version, because the plug pack gives out 3V at 2.8A - it was bought in 2011, so it isn't really new. But I like it because I don't like shortening the life span of my batteries by fast-charging them with 2A, I usually charge them at the lowest setting (I think it's 250mA), and also I often only charge 1 or 2 batteries in it, so the Vapex would be "too big" for me. I also noticed my charger showing too many mAh going into the batteries, but only in the third slot, so the other ones seem fairly accurate (at least considering what the capacity of the cells I'm charging is supposed to be). I think I'll stay with my charger for now. Why again was it that the older style power supply caused problems?
which make/model of intelligent charger do you use for checking capacitys etc.
+bigclivedotcom Do you know if Vapex makes any 18650 chargers?
where do you buy your eneloop battery and how do you spot a fake eneloop cells
I've never heard of anything like +dV termination. Furthermore, low self-discharge NiMHs get damaged slowly with trickle-charging so a proper -dV termination charger is ideal for them. Temperature cell monitoring (for +dT termination) is obvious on a charger as there are metal fingers contacting the sides of the cell to measure its temperature. In general, the logic for a proper -dV/dT charger is lot harder to design compared to LiIon. LiIon doesn't require the detection of sudden voltage or temperature deltas, you just apply a constant current until you measure 4.2V, and once you reach that, you switch to a constant voltage of 4.2V, and terminate once the current reaches 1/10 of the original charge current. A timer for terminating after 8-9 hours and overvoltage protection with a comparator (in case the IC logic locks up for some reason) are good o have.
Regarding -dV, it requires a cell to be charged at high current (at least 0.5C), otherwise the voltage drop after charge is complete is very minor and the IC will not detect it. This 8 cell charger looks like it time-shares current between slots and I wouldn't trust it to terminate correctly with multiple cells. I can only trust chargers that HJK from www.lygte-info.dk has tested.
Great video thanks for showing
How hard would it be to backlight the original?
What's your opinion of Nitecore cells/chargers?
They seem to have a decent reputation, but there are clones that may not have the same standards.
You can not tell the state of charge by the voltage on Lithium ion cells. You use either a custom solution columb counter / battery model alogrithm, or an implemented chip that does that for you.
Clive what are your thoughts on these chargers that apparently re-charge alkaline batteries? I've never used one but someone was asking me about them the other day, wondered if you'd disembowelled one to check out yet? It was always a no-no but maybe things have changed?
It can be done, but you're right it generally is a no no, they're prone to leaking no matter how careful you are re-charging, also the capacity tends to drop off quite dramatically after a few cycles, you can probably get MAXIMUM 10 (rapidly shortening) cycles out of an Alkaline cell before it basically leaks acid all over your charger and makes a huge mess.
Unlike the NiMh cells alkaline cells can't recombine the gas generated during charging, so the cells will often vent and damage the seals resulting in cell leakage. The amount of capacity you can get back from an alkaline cell is very poor. It's much cheaper and safer to just go with NiMh cells.
Ah nothing much has changed over the years i guess, i noticed they did state you could only recharge them 20 times max, clearly they know they are going to leak & crap out quite quickly. I'll let my friend know to avoid them, many thanks for the replies, oh & the chap with the Russian? name, i think it was more to do with re-cycling rather than saving money.
Found a datasheet on the 80F0308. According to the datasheet, "The MC80F0304/0308/0316 is advanced CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with 4K/8K/16K bytes of FLASH". Here's a link to that datasheet: archive.compgeke.com/PDF/IC%20Datasheets/MC80F0308-ABOV%20SEMICONDUCTOR.pdf
Did you ever try those chargers that were publicised in the 90s as being able to recharge alkaline batteries?
The good ol' Buddy L Super Charger! My family owned one in the 90s and after I read a story about Cubans 'recharging' hearing aid batteries by plugging them into a socket I got weirdly fixated on remembering what ours was called.
I had one of those. Worked OK. Was one of the few things I ordered from a infomercial.
Neat. A diode and resistive divider. I built a similar dodgy charger for a tiny NiMh battery pack I used in a very early use of a blue LED. (In my hard hat). I went the full hog and had two LEDs. One for standby and one for charging when a pack was plugged in.
Pure energy rechargeable alkaline cells.
Could you not change the display to a backlit one in the old charger?
What is a good 18650 battery charger for the US?
I would appreciate any help, thanks.
Hi Clive. Which charger for AA/AAA (Lithium/Nhmi) would you think is the best? Bonus if it charges other sizes. Cheers buddy. Love the videos.
I like this one, but if you don't mind a longer charge time the best chargers are actually the traditional slow ones, although they can literally take a day or more to fully charge some of the higher capacity cells.
Thank you. I was looking at the all singing all dancing ones, with refresh and all that, but if they serve no real extra purpose. Just one other question. Does it still extend the battery life to charge lithium (phone) batteries at a slower rate. I.e would I extend the life of a mobile phone battery by charging it at 500ma rather than 2000ma, using a lower current charger than the one that came with it.
The charger above looks good. Will scope it out.
Thanks again.
Interesting you charge so many cells at once... is that for work? Because at home I never run out of more than 4 cells at once, so I just have a cache of 4 AA and 4 AAA eneloops (low-discharge), and swap and then pop the depleted ones in the charger right away
Karl Baron In my band we always have one of these maxed out with an extra 9v charge section too. Wireless mics, wireless guitar packs and battery headphone amps. Other than that, I don't often need to charge more than four AA at home either.
I suspect he, like I, just has a quite large stock of batteries and quite a few appliances that use them. I just toss my depleted batteries into my 'discharged' container and charge them in batches when I run low.
Personally, I run thru batteries with my various flashlights I use for hiking fairly quickly, so there's always a few in the pile.
I only use NiteCore chargers, been using them for years for everything from AAAs to 26650s.
Never had anything wrong happen ever, because of that I feel safer using those.
I misread the Title as "Vape 8 times faster" and got really excited only to see that I was wrong.
Still, that sounds like something Bigclive would do.. maybe.. some day..
Is it possible to add a back light to your old charger
I bought a puro power bank and its very good can you do a teardown in the 2200 mha version
Sounds like it'll have a single 18650 cell inside.
A quite crappy one tbh.
Well its a single cell but its very good it even has airplane pass because its very stable
Calltheampulamp
Ah okay, that's another story. It's tuned to pass airplane certificates. The currently best cell is Panasonic NCR18650B, 3400 mAh. Dunno if it also passed airplane certification.
Why didn't you bodge some LEDs onto the older charger to light up the display?
looks like failure mode would be it stops working all together. If so then probably don't need thermal anyway.