Liitokala Lii 500 charger just died..

[Bort]

@gauss163

@Bort

@stephenk

…or get a DRAGON VP4 Plus which is in a different league of build quality (and price).

Good charger but not worth the price, plus the messed up percent indicator

It’s not yet clear whether or not XTAR has improved their fuel gauge tech compared to their prior models (which had many complaints). I touched on some of the technical aspects in a recent CPF thread (starting here), but unfortunately some XTAR fanboys flagged all of my posts in order to thwart any potential critiques, so further discussion was censored.

That’s unfortunate, because discussion was approaching the point where we might have been able to collect some hard data. The results would certainly be of much interest to potential buyers (esp. if the results turn out to be good, meaning the the Dragon would be the first consumer-level analyzing charger incorporating accurate fuel gauge tech, a major breakthrough at the consumer level).

If someone who owns the Dragon is interested in helping perform such tests then I will be happy to explain how to go about doing so. This requires having access to cells of widely varying capacity and health/IR in order to test how well the gauges work across the entire parameter spectrum.

Almost surely such fuel gauges will soon be appearing in many consumer-level chargers, so it would be useful to develop some standard testing protocols, so that reviewers can compare the implementations once they become more common.

I own the charger have done so in a preliminary way, but your going to hit too many battery model problems, every battery has different characteristics, you can’t come up with a voltage that will be accurate for all batteries (i have a dragon charger thread with some examples). Though it can be improved at least somewhat, the NiMH numbers are crazy bad

In a sense what your proposing has already been done, when you buy a cell phone its voltage vs percent charge is already mapped and put to use for its exact battery.