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.
That’s me in the photo… and no photoshopping was done… for an idea of the scale, I’m around 500 feet from the, uhhh, event…
That thing looks to be a real beast! Do you fly helis?
Wow, what is that you are running from?!