Author Topic: Going beyond #35 NiMH and NiCd Battery Charging Tutorial... as in *help please?*  (Read 2364 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline kaptain_zeroTopic starter

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 180
  • Country: ca
Dave,

I very much enjoyed your treatise of the NiMH and NiCd battery charging videos. However, there is a newer chemistry available called LiIon (and LiPo etc) that is out there, and it's causing all sorts of confusion. Personally, I was introduced to LiIon when it came to High Power LED flashlights and most of the LiIon cells and chargers I've been able to find are available from Asia with their questionable build quality. Over on the CPF forum, there are stories of flashlights behaving as pipe bombs due to inappropriately charged LiIon cells and or bad chargers and for that matter, simply badly made LiIon cells. Much of the chatter around these cells/chargers recommend purchasing a DMM to check the final charging voltage, with much focus on that a proper charger MUST do CC/CV with a complete cutoff of charging with no trickle (according to some cell manufacturers) and yet most Asian built chargers seem to mimic the CC/CV algorithms which is apparently "bad" and so goes the story. Then we have users buying $10 LiIon chargers and 2 for $5 14500 LiIon cells, only to purchase a cheap Asian made DMM to verify that that the charger stops charging at *EXACTLY 4.20v* as apparently going past 4.25v would turn a perfectly good battery cell into a "terrorist cell"! (Even I know that cheap and even higher priced DMM's are going to be less that perfectly accurate when we get into the lower Milli volt range).


We (though it's only me asking on behalf of the high performance flashlight community) need someone with some *real* technical/electronics knowledge to step up to the plate and tell us the way it really is without the marketing BS.

Personally, I don't trust my $10 lithium Ion charger any more than I trust my $10 Asian made DMM and so I have done my own homework and had my DMM checked against certified equipment so I know where I'm at, but I'm ONLY a lay person with enough of a background to know that I'm in the weeds here and need to rely on more qualified people to tell me what I really need to do to stay safe....

Here's hoping for some answers and maybe even a video blog on the topic, considering how much you enjoyed that Fenix LD01!  ;D

Regards

Christian

aka

Kaptain "All I ever do is connect + to - and I run everything else to ground" Zero
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf