I buy the JST-XH extention balance leads from ebay as hobby king is normaly sold out, the magnets i get from ebay., the rest is a mix of ebay and hobby king and i normaly have most stuff like heat shrink for my rc and car hobby.
There is a list of stuff i use here on post number #43 and there is a very quick run down on how to make them on post #88
On this thread there is some nimh (AAA, AA, D and C) battery holders i use for charging with my hobby charger, there is some of my picturers on the first page but the info and links start on post #74
Shadowww the 6s extention leads you have posted are way to short they would need to be extented or by the 45cm jst-xh extention leads to start with.
Any balance set up over 2s needs more then 20cm of lead 3s needs around 30cm, but you can cut them, joint, them solder them together cover the joins in heat shrink and so on or just buy longer balance leads to start with.
At the yellow line I turn the charger current off, because the battery is full. Immediately the voltage drops and will drop some more over the next few hours (Curve only show one hour). How much the voltage (red line) drops depends on a lot of factors (Like battery chemistry, termination current, battery age).
I put all the cells that were charged to 4.15V into a Trustfire TR003P4 charger and this charged them up to 4.2V, as measured by my DMM so I think it might be a fault with the Accucell.
I still find it strange that it drops so quickly to 4.15V, straight out of the charger though. Is that due to the way its charged as opposed to the Trustfire's charging algorithm?
I got the temperature probe today for this charger and it seems to work fine. I edited my review to include mention of it. Pretty neat feature. Recommended.
I’ve just this minute gotten my charger setup and working
I’m starting small and trying to charge a single 900mAh 14500.
I think I’m heading in the right direction, the charger and I both agree 1S with a termination voltage of 4.2v but I’m feeling a little cautious regarding charge current. What would you guys say is a safe current to charge at? I’m guessing that 1C would be safe but went with 600mA on the basis that slow is better than dangerous.
What I’d like to do is run the conditioning program and verify the actual capacity of the cell. Would I be right in thinking that I need to run the cycle and that the capacity is the number in the bottom right of the display once the charge is complete?
If anybody could give me some pointers I’d really appreciate it. I’m guessing it’s all fairly simple but having read horror stories I don’t want to be that bloke that burns his house down.
Congratulations! I usually use 1C or a little less because a 900mAh cell is usually more like 700. I think it cuts off when it goes below 100mA regardless (rather than 90 or 70 which would be 0.1C; I just don’t think it has the precision to go that low). If you enter 900mAh the voltage gets up to 4.2V (or 4.1V if you are on LiIo) pretty quickly and the current starts dropping. That is exactly what should happen.
Once you get it charged, you can do a discharge at whatever current you choose (up to 1A) and it will run it down to 3V, which sounds really low, but that’s 3V under load and the battery generally pops back up to 3.6V at rest. It reads out mAh, I think at the lower right.
If you won’t use the battery for a while, you can put a storage charge into it where the charger will either discharge or charge to a medium charge that is better for storing the cell.
- Just wire up the black and white wires as shown here.
Note: I already own several Prolific PL2303 based serial to USB devices, so drivers were not needed for me. I have heard of issues with installing them, especially with clone converter chips. This particular one appears to be genuine and was automatically detected and installed. You can get the official Prolific drivers here
- Once you install the drivers, hook up the USB to your PC and it should install (fingers crossed).
Then get LogView from here
Installation and operation were simple. Still working out some minor issues with LogView, particularly some labels that remain in German after selecting English, but it’s fairly easy to figure out what is what.
Edit: In LogView, Select IMax B6 as the logger. The Accucel 6 logs data identical to it.
I was skeptical when I ordered them, since they were 2 for $5… I’ve tried them on two different Win 7 PCs (one 32bit, one 64bit) and both work!. I’ve ordered a bunch more just to have them and for friends; very useful.