Is there a Multi Bay charger for Li-Ion's other than the Pila?

Preferably something that does at least 4 batteries and mixed at the same time if possible.

123's, 14500, 18650, etc?

What about a charger that does ALL chemistries?

Thanks and links would be appreciated.

George

XTAR WP6-II though it may be a tad high for 16340.


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Posted from my phone.

There is the new Sysmax / Nitecore I4 v2 charger.
I originally thought it wouldn't charge other chemistries but it does in v2. I only received mine yesterday. My original v1 only did lithium. My mistake. This is a added bonus.

mohanjude said:

There is the new Sysmax / Nitecore IB4 v2 charger. Only does Lithium.. If you want different chemistries buy a cheap RC hobby charger but you will need to make your own battery holders.

Click to expand...

That is incorrect. The Sysmax unit will also charge nimh and nicad in any combination.

So, will the Xtar do other battery types and why do you say it might be a tad high for the 16340?

Will the spacers work for the RCR123's?

How's the quality? I'd rather have 6 battery capacity than 4 but I get greedy like that

Can you mix and match sizes as long as they are li-ion's or whatever the chemistry is?

Thanks

George

Ualnosaj said:

XTAR WP6-II though it may be a tad high for 16340.


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Posted from my phone.

Click to expand...

How about the sysmax/nitecore, will that mix and match battery sizes if they're the same chemistry?

The Xtar is Li-ion only. It will not charge NiMh
16340's need extra spacers

Are there any 7 or 8-cell Li-Ion chargers? I need a 7-cell charger for 26500's for a hotwire build I'm working on.

There are barely any decent 2 cell chargers out there.

7 or 8 cells? Good luck!

Seems like a job for a half-decent hobby charger, especially if you plan on charging those big 26500 cells in anything resembling a reasonably short time frame. Any decent hobby charger could handle charging all 7 at once, wired in parallel.

madecov said:

The Xtar is Li-ion only. It will not charge NiMh
16340's need extra spacers

Click to expand...

Thanks. 123 size spacers or dummy cells will work just right, correct?

I've got two so I only need two more than. Cool.

Can I mix and match sizes at the same time as long as they are li-ions?

Actually, I see from the info on goinggear's site that that's a yes to all my questions
but I'll let the questions stand just to verify. Gotta get me one of those which means
I'll have several other chargers for sale

Gotta clean the house out

tandem said:

There are barely any decent 2 cell chargers out there.

7 or 8 cells? Good luck!

Seems like a job for a half-decent hobby charger, especially if you plan on charging those big 26500 cells in anything resembling a reasonably short time frame. Any decent hobby charger could handle charging all 7 at once, wired in parallel.

Click to expand...

Only problem is that all the hobby chargers I'm looking at are 6 cell max, and if I was to go with a hobby charger, I was planning on making a 7S pack, with a balance tap, so I could charge/balance at the same time.

Short time frame isn't a big issue for me, if taking longer means longer overall battery life. The batteries will be dead in roughly 5-8 minutes after turning the light on.

bstrickler said:

Only problem is that all the hobby chargers I'm looking at are 6 cell max, and if I was to go with a hobby charger, I was planning on making a 7S pack, with a balance tap, so I could charge/balance at the same time.

Short time frame isn't a big issue for me, if taking longer means longer overall battery life. The batteries will be dead in roughly 5-8 minutes after turning the light on.

Click to expand...

The CellPro chargers go up to 10 cells iirc.

flashflood said:

The CellPro chargers go up to 10 cells iirc.

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Yup, the Cellpro 10s will definitely do the job; along the way bstrickler would also get individual cell internal resistance and readings. Wire up the balance taps according to one of the common radio control pack schemes or use Revolectrix's own scheme and connector board for simplicity.

Charging overly slowly won't prolong cell life; charging them to something less than a full charge will. It might be that your runtime isn't much different if you charge each cell only to 4.10v or even a little less.

The Cellpro 10s and its bigger bother Cellpro Powerlab 8 are really good chargers.

tandem said:

Yup, the Cellpro 10s will definitely do the job; along the way bstrickler would also get individual cell internal resistance and readings. Wire up the balance taps according to one of the common radio control pack schemes or use Revolectrix's own scheme and connector board for simplicity.

Charging overly slowly won't prolong cell life; charging them to something less than a full charge will. It might be that your runtime isn't much different if you charge each cell only to 4.10v or even a little less.

The Cellpro 10s and its bigger bother Cellpro Powerlab 8 are really good chargers.

Click to expand...

I have their little brother, the Cellpro Multi4 and have been very happy with it. Lots of diagnostic feedback (cell voltage, %full, charge current, total mAh, etc), support for all chemistries (all flavors of Li-ion, LiFePO4, NiMH, NiCD), fully programmable, and very reliable and accurate.

The only thing I'd really ding Cellpro for is the PC interface. Instead of having a simple USB port, it has this funky FUIM-3 port, so you have to use their FUIM-3 to USB adapter to connect to the PC -- not a big deal, but it's needlessly clumsy. Also, their charger software *still* only runs on Windows, and relies on a whole bunch of .NET garbage just to install itself. The app itself is trivial -- the kind of thing you'd learn to write in a Java 101 class -- so I can't imagine why it wasn't written in a modern language that would run on any platform, including mobile.

If I were a college student, or retired, I would just spend a month reverse engineering the wire protocol and writing a really first-rate app for it.

All that said, you can (and I generally do) use the charger without the PC connection at all. You still get all the diagnostics on the LCD screen. All you need the PC for is programming custom charge profiles and getting charge graphs (current vs. time, capacity vs. time, etc). And it's not like any other charger is any better on the software front, as far as I can tell. (The iCharger, in particular, gives false hope with its name. No, it's not made by Apple, and no, it can't talk to anything but a Windows PC.)

I'd forgotten about my initial angst over the proprietary PC interface, but I have it and that's that.

It'd be great if someone (meaning someone else!) reverse engineered the wire protocol; better yet if this mythical person with lots of free time could built a USB interface on to the box LOL.

I scratch my head as to why they went the route they did; is the RC world predominantly Windows driven? Maybe it is.

It sounds like you may have tried to run their FUMI / the control software in a virtual Windows instance, with failure? Bummer if so. If you haven't tried it, I will soon.

Recently I built a Hackintosh and am running Windows in a VirtualBox virtual machine for the only other two apps that I *need* which only run on Windows. I've not tried the control interface for my Powerlab 8 yet and have a full throttle renovation going on here at Chez Tandem so that's going to have to wait until I can catch my breath a bit.

tandem said:

I scratch my head as to why they went the route they did; is the RC world predominantly Windows driven? Maybe it is.

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Totally OT, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news, as I'm not a Microsoft fan at all, but the last time I checked, the whole world was predominantly Windows driven.

As I remember 90% of the world's desktop and laptop computers use some version of MS Windows. The remaining 10% use Mac, Linux, Solaris, and other, in that order. Despite what you see in the movies and on TV, "garbage sells", I guess.:shrug:

Dave

45/70 said:

Totally OT, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news, as I'm not a Microsoft fan at all, but the last time I checked, the whole world was predominantly Windows driven.

As I remember 90% of the world's desktop and laptop computers use some version of MS Windows. The remaining 10% use Mac, Linux, Solaris, and other, in that order. Despite what you see in the movies and on TV, "garbage sells", I guess.:shrug:

Dave

Click to expand...

Five years ago, definitely. But today iOS and Android are out-shipping Windows because most devices are not PCs.

People writing Windows-specific software today are chaining themselves to a dying market. In some cases, this still makes economic sense in the near term. But for a trivial, performance-insensitive app like charger control, it's just stupid.

Again OT but flashflood hits it on the head there IMO as the desktop PC isn't where all the growth is. The world increasingly is a multi-OS playground and that trend is only strengthening. Already some vendors do a good job at supporting multiple environments; in the future we'll see this as more important than ever.

All other things being equal I tend to buy products that are more open or more agnostic over operating systems than those which are more closed or tightly tied to one OS or another. Same goes for Mac software in the reverse direction.

No doubt this musing belongs in a thread in the Cafe but it would not surprise me to one day see Apple make OS X or its descendants be officially supported on any popular "PC" computing architecture.