My review is nearly done, but I was trying some new testing and damaged the charger, before I was finished (My fault, not the charger). I have got a new one a few days ago and will finish the review soon.
This is what I don’t understand. Why would anyone purchase the Lii-100? I bought one. It was reputed to overcharge batteries but I said “Aw, what the hell, I’ll check it out”. It did indeed overcharge my battery and I threw it in the dumpster. I know there is a reason behind the thinking here but I’m missing it. Why trust cells to a charger that costs a fraction of the cost of the cell itself and charges them improperly? Not trying to be a smart-ass—I just would like to know.
Only some of those chargers overcharged, not sure which batch it was. I checked all of my Liitokala chargers and none of them overcharged - but I was late to the party back when they came into fashion.
They are lightweight, cheap, easy to use, have multi-chemistry, multi-sizes and also a powerbank feature. It is the ideal travel charger, a great gift or stocking filler, amazing in the glove box, or fit in the go-bag/backpack.
Our BLF modification of this charger on here (forgot who/where it was) added the missing voltmeter and it was a popular mod. But even without the voltmeter the charger displays the charge status when you put a battery in.
Well fellows, this demonstrates either their obvious lack of language understanding and/or their dishonesty. And I do not mean to judge.
I'll try to be as clear as possible. This has to do with component tolerances, target consumer market's awareness level and related belief systems (more is better maybe?). Charging voltage is determined via a resistor divider, if this divider is made with 1% tolerance resistors it is quite likely that about half of chargers will “overcharge” to some extent. Since termination current value also plays a role, causing a slight additional drop in charging voltage, it is likely that the default maximum charging voltage is by default set slightly high to compensate.
I was looking forward to getting three or four of these little chargers because of the display, but now that I know that it does not display the actual voltage of the cell I can save a few bucks and forget about it.
Aliexpress emailed tracking info: “Parcel Status Arrived in destination country; awaiting customs clearance.” It will be interesting to see if there will be further tracking info, and how long it will take until final delivery.
With the listed sale price at <3bux, I figure I’ll pull the trigger on a few. It’s nice to be able to see the realtime voltage as it’s charging, but not have to drag along an Opus or almighty Miboxer to work if I just want to top off a cell.
I keep a 100B in my bag just in case, but only 4 LEDs doesn’t say much. Being able to pull it when it hits, say, 4.1V or even 4.0V would be nice.
Technically, if you pull the cell just upon voltmeter hitting somewhere near maximum voltage, since charging current will still be close to 1A/0.5A it can be grossly predicted that final cell voltage would lay around where you want. Voltage differential dV ≈ I × R, where I is the remaining charging current and R is the sum of cell plus rail contact plus other resistances.
For ePacket shipments, the USPS tracking system will now even show status beginning with acceptance in China. One of the random Chinese tracking sites will give greater detail when it’s inside the China Post system, but aside from that, the USPS will have it covered from start to finish.
The trip across the pond actually takes only a few days. Once it reaches the states, it has to be processed through one of USPS’ International Service Centers, which can seemingly take forever (and often a source of complaint), then onto the local regional distribution center and final post office for delivery.
I made a video (it’s boring, probably go to Youtube Settings and playback at 2x speed)
It doesn’t show real-time charging current, but shows real-time voltage (not sure how accurate, but at least more granularity than the 0-25-50-75-100% LED bars of other chargers)