What's your favorite 8 bay charger?

[dmenezes]

@Bob_McBob

It’s not the programming I find annoying, it’s the lack of automatic chemistry detection in anything except the dummy mode.

One day automatic chemistry detection may be implemented, specially after we succeed in reverse-engineering the MC3000 firmware.

@Mandrake50

OK. Everyone has their own use case and set of likes and dislikes.

I agree with Mandrake – different strokes for different folks and all that. In my case, I would rather have something that gives me more control, than less.

Case in point: one day a crappy piece of electronics over-discharged one of my 18650s to the point my MiBoxer C8 started auto-detecting it as a NiMH (and yes, I know over-discharged Li-Ions are no longer safe and should be discarded and yadda yadda, but that’s not the point). I ended up having to find a dumb charger that was also very slow so I could slowly charge it up to 2.5V before the Miboxer C8 was able to recognize it properly. I hate it when some supposedly ‘smart’ acts like it’s smarter than me, and restricts me from doing WTF I want; this episode sucked so much it stuck to my memory and was one of the reasons for my buying a MC3000.

@Bob_McBob

There are other annoyances. The test time after you insert a cell is fairly long, and if you start a program on that slot before it’s ready, it will show as starting and then just reset. I’ve come back to non-charged cells many times because of this.

I also think the tabs on the spring-loaded terminals are far too easy to bend, even when manually holding them open to insert a cell.

Neither of these ever happened to me. But then I always operate my MC3000 over bluetooth (I almost never touch its front panel), and I always pull the tabs using my fingers instead of trying to use the batteries’ butts for this.

Some of my 40Ts won’t make contact unless I carefully position them hanging up in the air. And the metal parts are starting to pick up rust spots.

From this and the “tab-bending” part above, I guess you have an old(er) version of the MC3000, no? The recent ones have a different “nub” pattern on the tabs that works with basically any battery I tried so far (the only ones I had some difficulty were my AAA eneloops – it works if you place them all the way down into the MC3000 bays, but I don’t like it very much the way the nub contacts the battery, so I hang them up “in the air” – not a problem as NiMH can’t go into thermal runaway and so the MC3000 per-bay thermometer isn’t really necessary when charging them.

most of the time I just want to insert cells and have them charge at a reasonable rate without any fiddling.

Now you lost me. Isn’t that exactly what the MC3000 “dumb” mode provides?