thanks for the links! benckie, you want to share photos and wiring diagram of your setup? ;)
Well basicly the battery holder's come wired like this.
I add a large female tamiya connector to the battery holder leads and i bit of 3mm heat shrink to neaten things up a bit.
To be technically correct the positive wire goes on the left when the large single tab of the female connect is facing down and the two small separate tab's are facing up and the connector is facing away from you so the side the terminals slide into is facing you.
You will understand what i mean if you had a female tamiya connector in front of you, but as long as the positive and negitive wire match from the battery holder to the main charge cable it is all good.
Then i use 4 mm male banana plugs as this will fit all hobby chargers and 4 mm (16 awg) black and red silicone wire and 5 mm heat shrink and make a main charge lead like the one in the bottom of this picture below.
You don't have to use tamiya connectors you can use any plug of your choice or plug it directly into the charger, I do it this way cause i have many things that plug into that tamiya main charge lead so i can swap back and forward and i pick large tamiya connectors cause they are cheap, very common and Ive been using them since the 1990's, now they need a special crimping tool, Ive never brought one, i just fold and squish the pin,s over the wire with long nose pliers and then solder them its much stronger then crimping alone IMO.
Or you can buy a premade tamiya main charge lead but you will still have to add female tamiya connectors to the battery holders.
4mm banana connectors these are actualy bullet connectors but i like them better over the banana connectors as the wire is held in with solder so a screw thats easly strips but heat shrink is needed.
All items can be found on hobby king (apart from the battery holders) or ebay for dirt cheap you can make a few battery holders for less then a few bucks each and have parts left over to make up more charging leads for your hobby charger.
Ive posted all thats needed, the battery holders are only cheap and the wire they come with is only good for 4 amps maybe 5 amps top,s, Ive noticed no excess heat with 4 amp charges on my icharger, this should be fine and since they are in series the charge rate is the same as if you are doing a single battery its just the voltage increases automicly with the charger and the time of the charge is shorter.
I perfer to slow charge as many batteries as i can in a group, then fast charge them one at a time, slow charging in a group oftern works out faster then fast charging one by one and the batteries will last longer, take more mAh and the internal resistance will stay lower for longer.
Now for people using 10 000 mAh D cells 4 to 5 amp max might not be good enough, my D cells are only 5000 mAh and i only charge them at 0.125 c to 0.5 c but for AA, AAA and C cell,s it should be more then enough i hope this helps.
Thanks benckie for all! great instructive contribution :)
looks a little complicated but such posts help to get started.
H)
I have to make another 4 X D cell holder soon ill try to remember to take some pictures as im doing it, but its fairly straight forward.
HobbyKing has pretty good selection of plugs/connectors. Personally, I like the XT60 connectors (the yellow connectors shown in benckie's setup), overkill for battery charging but they are easy to solder and work on. I use them on my RC.
EC2, EC5, Traxxas (black connectors shown in benckie's setup) and Deans are pretty good too.
They are all good connectors, you dont see deans around to much now, hpi still use them on the hpi vorza, but most battery sellers are not aloud to sell batteries with deans any more.
I brought a few bags of the clone traxxas connectors and i like them a really tight snug fit easy to solder cheap ive been using them at around 40 amps no problem they should be good for more.
For my next project im going to use 6mm bullet connectors on the ESC and batteries run in parralell as they will need to give around 120 amp, ill reverse the connectors so in a rush i know i will not be able to connect them.
But for the thin wire used in these battery holders ive found the xt60, traxxas and dean connectors to be to tight for the wire thats used its to easy to break the wire while trying to remove the plugs to swap out battery holders or change the charging set up and they are way over kill for charging nimh batteries hence why i use the tamiya connectors.
I made some more of these today, crimped and soldered plugs on them and added a bit of heat shrink to neaten up the wires. Top 4 x D cell battery holder wired in series for charging brought from eBay. Bottom 3 x 18650 battery holder wired in series for testing 12.6 volt brought from DX.
I found these 3 x 26650 battery holders and 3 x 18650 battery holders to be handy for storage and could be useful for a charging cradle or custom power supply for DIY projects. i like the fact they lock together.
I have been using them for a while now and they seam well built so far so good, crap pic,s sorry
Just saw your other post on them. How exactly do they lock on? Would they work on unprotected batteries?
They slide into place and are pretty tight and will only come out one way, the batteries do not fall out easy, you have to pry the top and bottom off the batteries together but the holders stay locked together, if that makes sense.
They will work with protected and unprotected batteries as long as all the cells are with in a couple of mm of each other. but you can not lock 26650 and 18650 battery holders together only the same type of holder can be locked together.
Ive tried them with king kong and protected trustfire 26650,s, trustfire flames 2400, solarforce 2400 V2's, NCR18650A's 3100, hi-max 2600, redilast 2600 18650 cells and they seam to all fit well.
I would use Velcro or elastic bands if your going to move around a lot with them say in a back pack in a large pocket.
Just built this 12 volt, 3 amp power supply for use with my hobby charger. I know it's a bit under powered for most of you charging big battery packs. For my needs, balance charging a maximum of 3 18650's at 1 amp, it's more than enough power. I had all the parts in stock except the actual power supply module. I purchased that off ebay for around $7.
Installed an amp meter in the power supply. Right now I'm discharging a Panasonic 18650
Mouse over: Charging the same battery at 2.5 amps charge rate (only for a few seconds to see if
the other digit works)
Damn, that's a sweet looking charger!
Have a look at this icharger. For a few $ more it's much better quality and features (more accurate balancing, among others). It has higher discharge current that is needed for capacity testing. You may also want to read this excellent thread on serial charging with hobby chargers and the icharger specifically.
It's the same one I'm using. Although I'm not using it anywhere near it's capacity, it's balancing accuracy blows away my cheap Turnigy Accucell 6. Highly recommended!
From what I've been reading, it's not a great idea to balance charge batteries with vastly different remaining charges. I imagine it'd be even worse if charging different types of batteries. So to bypass those issues, I might just get this charger or something similar.
To give you an idea of my charging needs in the near future... After a night bike ride every other night, I'll need to charge 4 26650's and 2-4 14500's, all with different charges. Right now I'm charging half that many with a pair of single bay chargers, one of which charges at 360 mA. That's already driving me crazy. I'll go bonkers trying to charge twice as many batteries.
I think that would depend on how 'vastly different' you mean. With a quality charger that has good balancing accuracy the biggest downside is that it's going to take longer to bring the weaker cells up to the stronger ones. But you do need a decent charger.
A case in point: I made a balance charging harness to charge two cells today. I used it to charge two cells, one at 3.83v and one at 3.90v. My charger is an X-charger B6 and it charges/discharges one cell at a time very nicely and accurately. But I found out today that it's balancing accuracy is crappy. The two cells finished at 4.1 and 4.18 respectively, so they started at 70mv apart and finished 80mv apart!
I'm hoping for much better results with the icharger that I will be getting for Xmas.
I just got in one of these… :party: Dual channel with up to 10 lipo cells per channel, can charge at up to 70 amps… You can also charge on one channel and discharge on the other at the same time. I’m driving it with a 28V/11A supply (but have a 28V/60 amp one if I need more juice)
I wonder what an UltraFire cell will do if charged at 70 amps? J)
Very, very nice. It’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it
You'd probably live up to your handle then :)
Make sure to get video!
From a safe distance.