Hi, I’m interested in one, thank you for this project.
I have some suggestions, some sounds probably very niche but it costs nothing to say them :
- Support for LTO , (min 1.8~2V, max 2.6~3V), I imagine it’s just a firmware thing.
- Support for any chemistry (setting any charge voltage allowed by the charging circuit), for futur proofing, if support is dropped at some point for example, or for charging already existing exotic stuff (like LTO, if a setting for it is not added, or even a super capacitor for example, but would need to be able to charge at set current from 0V), may require a more advanced UI though.
- Adding the option to never stop the charge, i.e. floating the cells.
- Ability to easily connect leads for charging any format outside of the charger slots (big cylindrical, wired, non opposite terminal cylindrical etc…), it’s usually easy for the sliding negative contacts with an alligator clip, but not for the positive one against the body, could be with the help of threaded holes, similarly to this charger for example, or by having contacts going higher than the body or rather just having the body go a little lower behind the terminals, or another idea…
- About the fan, the bigger the better, I saw some discussions about it but I’m not sure if it has been decided or not, bigger is better for cooling and noise, it would be great if it was a standard sized PC fan (80,92, 120mm… etc) considering that probably a lot of us have some lying around if original fan fails, and if not there is a huge offering of inexpensive decent PC fans to choose from, also allowing to replace the original fan with a higher quality one. But the voltage of the original fan can be an issue, if it’s 5V then some 12V PC fan might be too slow, at ~7V or above is generally fine depending on the model, if the original is 12V then it can be replaced by a either a low rpm 12V fan, or simply using a resistor on a faster 12V one.
Case in point, I replaced a 35mm noisy 5V fan with a 80mm on a charger and the whole process was annoying, aside from the charger body modification, all 80mm 5V fan that I found were way too fast at 5V, and could not be undervolted without stalling. I ended up adding a small boost converter to step up the voltage to 7.5V and used a standard 12V PC fan.
thanks for reading.