Nice work Robert. :+1: Good review on a promising looking charger. I really like that it has an internal resistance reading (as long as it’s reasonably accurate) and love that it has a finished charging timer. I can think of many times a “finished” timer would have been helpful.
Welcome Leo. Nice to see you commenting so quickly in response to your product. Keep that up and you’ll find a very good response here.
I got this charger from Sally
I did a first check on it reading the manual and test some nearly full cells
A full review will be posted soon
I am interested to do more tests with different cells and a dummy cell increasing the internal resistance with an external resistor, to see how it adjusts the charge, as there is no option to set the charge current manually
The charger claims to auto adjust the charge current in relation to the cells, I hope they got that implemented well for tiny cells like 10180
The new USB standard with 5/12V is nice implemented, even just adding a car adapter,
as I got no new USB wall supply with 12V, the hollow plug of the first 12V PSU I grabbed from my very old 4 slot NiMh charger fits perfectly
A normal 5V 2A USB charger cant deliver enough for both slots charging with 1.5A, will test that as well with some USB power supplies to see if the charger adjust the charge current even with a small wall adapeter below 2A
So far I can tell that the new internal resistance measurement is far more consistent than the C4 charger as it seems to do the readings over time and even them out, while the C4 just do one measurement when inserting the cell
The contact plate on positive side gets improved to have a larger area making contact to the cell, I was not the only one noticing some wrong resistance reading and voltage drop
A discharge functionality would have been nice, but it tracks the charging mAh on all slots which is definately better than the C4 with only one channel discharge test, which can take all night on a high Ah cell
For a 2 slot charger it is definately wider than some other models making the charge of 2 D cell or 32650 possible
I don’t know if this is any indication, but it charged a 14500 at 1.5A, same as an 18650. I don’t own any of those tiny flashlights, but don’t most of them have a built in micro usb charger? Anyone wanting to charge a 10180 would have to make a spacer for it anyway, since they aren’t long enough to fit.
Yikes! That’s way high for a 14500 and WAY too higher for cells smaller than that. Hi drain 18650 are fine there and it’s good for 26650 and the other big cells but I don’t charge 14500 cells above 0.5A personally.
I thought it was a little high for a 14500 too, but I was closely watching and the cell never got hot. Only slightly warm. The 14500 cell is a newer Efest 650mAh