A short while back, I got a Nitecore i8 charger and it has worked pretty well up until recently. Now, I have one port that always turns green when I put a battery in it, no matter how much charge the battery has. Doesn’t matter if the battery is NiMH or Li-Ion.
I took the bottom plate off and visually inspected both sides of the board … no signs of overheating, scorch marks, or corrosion. All the capacitors look good too. No bulging or leaking.
I believe there may also be another board on the topside of the charger, but I couldn’t figure out how to pull apart the two sides of the charger without risking breakage. 7 working ports is better than none.
Anybody else had this problem with the i8 or a similar Nitecore charger? And do you have any advice for what to try? I’m pretty novice when it comes to working with microelectronics, but I at least have a multimeter and some soldering gear.
My Nitecore UM2 became useless to me, when the Micro USB port developed a flaky connection to the board. I took it apart and inspected it. The micro soldering required to fix it was way too precise for the kind of soldering I can do. I tried to use a glue to keep the port from moving around, but the trouble is the force required to insert a plug is too much for that. JUNK.
Went with a Fenix charger, the ARE-D2. Love it. Well built and it’s a touch smaller than the UM2. I now leave the plug in and detach from the power supply end to avoid wear & tear on the charger’s USB port.
Yea, I haven’t exactly been thrilled with Nitecore myself. My D4 housing started to separate a year into ownership, and is now being held together with epoxy. At least it’s still fully functional.
I contacted Nitecore asking about their lifetime repair service on the i8, and while they will repair for free, round trip shipping to/from their repair center in China is just under $50. Not dysfunctional enough to spend the money replace/repair, and yet that one broken port is a lot of temptation to try and ignore forever.
Now that I have an MC3000 I may get around to opening up the i8 to see if I can find the issue
The port in question will show a red indicator when a battery is present, but never charges. This could have been quite an issue - I was charging cells for a 4P light and noticed the one was still red when the others had indicated fully charged for hours. I checked cell voltage outside the charger, then the voltage of the cell while it was “charging” in that slot, and it was the same.
Had I not noticed, the 4 unprotected cells would have tried to equalize charge as rapidly as possible once installed in the light…