chrissybabe
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2013
- Messages
- 6
Before I tell you what I am looking for I should say that I don't really care whether the discharger also charges although that would be nice. I am reasonably happy with my standard chargers. I also tend to favour battery packs that allow assembly from loose cells rather than worrying about balancing charging etc. Assembled packs do fail and it is amazing how quick a couple of years comes around and you have to disassemble and rebuild again just because a single cell has failed.
What I am after is a discharger (and charger if built in) that will allow me to discharge a cell at a known (adjustable ?) current and monitor the time it takes. It also needs to be monitored over a USB port by a laptop or PC and present the results in a graph or at least give a rating based on the area under the discharge curve which will be the cells capacity. I have found a charger called the Battman 2 which does exactly what I want but it was designed for a parallel port output, plus circuit boards etc are probably pretty hard to come by. The idea is the process doesn't need to be manually monitored. I am sure that there are plenty of ways to do this but I don't want to have to spend the next 6 months building and programming it.
This was prompted by my wifes bike light batteries, upon being fired up for the approaching winter, promptly failing over 50% of them. She had 4 packs and two are dead. No problem rebuilding them but I have other things I would rather be doing. And making them look half way decent and waterproofing them just adds a heap of overhead. I have also been using these packs for my caving lights but have made alternate packs using single cells that are working rather well. Being able to measure the capacity in a reproducible way makes cell matching really easy.
What I am after is a discharger (and charger if built in) that will allow me to discharge a cell at a known (adjustable ?) current and monitor the time it takes. It also needs to be monitored over a USB port by a laptop or PC and present the results in a graph or at least give a rating based on the area under the discharge curve which will be the cells capacity. I have found a charger called the Battman 2 which does exactly what I want but it was designed for a parallel port output, plus circuit boards etc are probably pretty hard to come by. The idea is the process doesn't need to be manually monitored. I am sure that there are plenty of ways to do this but I don't want to have to spend the next 6 months building and programming it.
This was prompted by my wifes bike light batteries, upon being fired up for the approaching winter, promptly failing over 50% of them. She had 4 packs and two are dead. No problem rebuilding them but I have other things I would rather be doing. And making them look half way decent and waterproofing them just adds a heap of overhead. I have also been using these packs for my caving lights but have made alternate packs using single cells that are working rather well. Being able to measure the capacity in a reproducible way makes cell matching really easy.
