For those who have never yet tried a hobby charger and may be wondering what's involved for charging the kind of li-ion cells flashaholics typically use, it can be done with very minimal equipment. I was initially hesitant to try one after seeing some of the very clever and fancy battery holders that some members have fabricated and shown previously in various threads in this forum. But it's really not necessary to fabricate anything fancy or special to start using a hobby charger.
So here's a few photos showing use of Accucell 6 with a very bare bones setup (stock cables that come with charger, power source is an old laptop power supply that plugs directly into this particular charger's stock power input jack, and a few small rare earth magnets from DX):
For those unfamiliar with the display on these chargers, I think the display in the above photo is showing: Li1S (LiPo charging, 1 cell in series), 0.2A (0.2A charge current at this point in the cycle), 4.20V (presently charging at 4.20 volts, which also means the charger is in the CV stage where the voltage remains constant at 4.20 while the charge current gradually decreases until it reaches 1/10th of whatever the starting charge current was), CHG (charging), 017:48 (17 minutes 48 seconds elapsed since charging started), 00084 (84 mA pushed to the battery so far).
A pair of small DX rare earth magnets:
Fortunately the magnets stick to the alligator clips:
Close up of alligator clip attached to positive terminal of battery with 2 magnets:
For scale, battery in above photos is a 14500.
Here's a shot showing charging parallel charging of two 18350 batteries at the same time using some additional short home made alligator clip cables and a few more magnets:
When parallel charging as in the above photo, the charger just sees one big battery with the capacity of all cells added together. One could daisy chain even more than the two batteries shown in the photo together. The max voltage is unchanged (still 4.20V). So in this situation the only setting that needs to be adjusted is the starting charge current which should be increased by the user to accommodate the higher capacity of both batteries added together. The cells are self balancing when parallel charging.
Notes: 1. None of the magnets in the above photos have been soldered to anything. 2. For safety, it is preferable and recommended to not charge on flammable surfaces (although so far, all my li-ion cells and the charger have always stayed cool the touch throughout the charging process).