Re-review: Soshine SC-F3 Ni-MH LiFePO4 Charger

It may be my charger is faulty, although it appears to be working. :frowning: I opened a support ticket last night.

Nice review! Sorry you had bad luck with the charger. It does look elegant though. :slight_smile:

Nice review Chloe. That charger is pretty alluring. Its a shame it has problems. Hopefully its just a lemon & fasttech exchanges it.
Kinda disappointing that the leds don’t show charge progress.

Sweet an Apple iCharger! lol

As the charger is clearly faulty, FastTech will be sending me a replacement, so I’ll update the review when it arrives (it’s only fair).

Chloe, nice charger!

For a while there has been around a Soshine Coolook branded battery tester that looked exactly the same, so its kind of interesting to see that they Soshine have used this form factor to make universal LED charger.

And then theres also their SC-S7 charger, which, oddly, has the same funcitons+LCD, but costs 2-3x as much.

Kreisler - i4 is not what people thought at first it would be, its neither the most accurate nor the most safe and reliable ;)!

The replacement charger came yesterday. I tested it extensively today. You can see it also has the Soshine logo:

I made a video that illustrates the fault clearly:

DMM is set to measure charging current.
Two seconds in I switch on power to mains 1A USB supply.
LEDs on charger show it is charging, DMM shows ~300mA
After ~40 seconds of charging the current rises to ~800mA then charging stops.

I have repeated tests with Philips Ni-MH, and laptop USB power too. Just to make sure it isn’t a problem with new eneloops only, or the power supply.

I took both apart to compare PCB and they appear exactly the same. It seems to be a programming issue. If it is meant to charge Ni-MH at 800mA, why does it always stop soon after?

I have reported this to FastTech.

Chloe, wow, are you really a woman?
I don’t know any gal who knows so much about electronics as you do! Truly amazing

Thanks for the review!!!

Yes I am! I don’t know that much, enough to make small repairs and modifications I guess. I used to tinker with things a lot more than I do now.

You may be surprised to know, there are many women who work in electronics assembly, or higher up as R&D level engineers. Like IT and sciences, it is a difficult field to get into as a woman, but I don’t think gender should stop anyone pursuing their interests!

Hi Chloe, you’re right, it’s just that I’m not around the that type of women :wink:
Great to see some more electronic skilled gals! Keep up the good work

It might be because the charger uses voltage (not -DV) to stop charging and you have to much resistance in your wires and DMM.

Thanks, HKJ. It happens without the DMM etc. connected too so it’s not that. I almost expect the Li-ion charging to be fine but I don’t have any cells to test.

FastTech said they have notified Soshine about it, so I will send these chargers back to them.

I began packaging the chargers and thought I’d test the replacement charger one last time. A good thing I did!

This time I left the charger plugged in for a few minutes just to observe, and it appears to work! Not only that, but the display does show charging progress, as I hoped it would! :party:

To be fair it isn’t explained anywhere that it takes almost a minute after inserting a cell to begin proper charging. HKJ was right too, about my DMM having too much resistance. This is why the charger started flashing red after a minute, in the video I posted. It also does this with a cell it decides it cannot charge (I have some older Philips Ni-MH that my Angeleyes charger also won’t charge).

So, I am going to rewrite the review in due course.

Thanks for your honesty Chloe. Good luck with the new review.

Thank you! I hope the new review is helpful. I also made a short video of it in operation:

P.S. It’s interesting that I can use this cheap DMM can measure the current, with bell wire, but the more expensive Uni-T DMM has too much resistance.

“This Video is Private” message appears. Now I really am interested. :smiley:

Oops! I changed it to public so you can hopefully see it now. Thanks, Woody!

Glad you got the charger sorted. That nosey bear wasn’t the cause of the problem, was it?

I think he might have had something to do with it, very distracting!! :smiley:

Haha… Love the bear! I never though it was possible to make a measurement video funny, and cute… But Chloe did it! :smiley:
And then I saw the knife video. :heart_eyes:
Chloe is officially one awesome badass women… With some nice nails too