I just bought several different 26650 batteries of eBay, would this iMax B6 be good for checking to see how good a charge the batteries are holding?
yesss
You can do that with a voltmeter, AND it’s not a very good way to asses much from your batteries. If they hold voltage poorly then they are indeed bad. If they say ultrafire you know they are junk.
First, terminology; ALL the 4-button hobby chargers that look like the IMAX are CLONES, including the IMAX. There is a real (clone) IMAX B6.
There are people making and selling FAKES of the CLONES. These are cheaper, of poor quality, with problems with over/under volt charging, balancing, awful NiXX charging, and early death. *If you don’t have the ability to check it out……don’t go there.
*
If it’s eBay and cheap > it’s fake. :bigsmile:
If it does not SPECIFY it’s a ‘real’ one > it’s probably fake. But I’m not sure how much you can trust that from liars.
If you don’t have a decent storefront supporting the product, buyer beware.
Here’s some other ways you can tell:
Authentication.
Video
Test video
FWIW Hobby King sells an original AND a fake/copy. They even SAY it’s a copy and are up front that it’s not as good a product.
Makes me wonder why anyone would buy this when it’s potentially dangerous.
Buy an Accucel-6, they are decent and essentially the same price.
You’ve been warned. 
Yes, they are Ultrafire, but I would still like to figure out how much of a charge they can hold.
[quote=Tacoboy]
Hold = capacity.
Voltage won’t tell you anything useful about capacity at all.
Get an Opus unless you want to play with all kinds of chemistry.
So how do we charge a pack of NiCd (or NiMH) sub-C cells, say a 6s1p or 12s1p configuration?
i have the iCharger 206B+ , read the instructions manual , but the NiCd charging program has only a setting for charging current, not for number of cells (except for the Forming Charge program).
Does it mean that the iCharger doesn't care about the number of NiMH cells in series but simply charges and charges until the delta-V signal is triggered?
And how is it solved on the IMAX B6?
Cell count is ignored on this kind of charger, up to the limit of the charger. You can set the current and there is a setting for termination buried in there somewhere.
Thanks!
i found the setting “DeltaV sensitivity” and set it to “10mV/cell”.
imho on this kind of charger, charging NiMH in series (like a battery pack) is not the best thing to do. what if cell1 is 50% full, cell2 is 10% full, cell3 is half-defective, cell4 is 90% full. cell5 has a higher capacity than cell1-4, and cell6 doesn’t take a charge? then how will the termination work? This scenario is true for older cell packs.
The best scenario would be: each cell gets monitored individually, as in the balance charging of LiPo battery packs.
In theory, I agree. But, this is not lithium and it simply does not work the same way. NiMh simply does not charge in the same way as lithium. To charge it at all you HAVE to overcharge it, at least a little. There’s a fine line between overcharge (missing termination) and undercharge (early termination).
If you get real fussy you may have to tweak the sensitivity on a pack by pack basis. I have a Piranha charger that allows me 10 different settings so I use that most of the time. I hardly ever use the RC charger for NiXX anymore unless it’s more than 8 cells, the limit for the Piranha.
I think you can do something similar with the iCharger but my Acucell-6 is kind of a pain to program so I’ve never bothered.
Thanks for the assessment.
We never heard of Piranha chargers. What’s the official website of the manufacturer? Or do you believe it’s a trading company?
Piranha is made by Duratrax. They don’t sell that model anymore. Dedicated NiXX “pack” chargers are not common these days. Here’s the manual if someone is curious. I think that maybe for NiXX it may work a tad better than an RC charger….maybe. Works for 1-8 cells. When I got into RC, lithium was new and expensive. NiXX was still the power source of choice. That changed in a couple more years.
I have a spare I’d pass on for shipping cost if someone wants it ($10 likely). USA only though.