Home made Lithium Ion battery charger

Home made Lithium Ion battery charger
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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/25/2003 11:17 AM

curtqn

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If you want instruction how to make a simple,inexpensive lithium ion battery DC charger(less than 10 bucks).Charge 1 to 3 cells. charge current adjustable.

E-mail me.

Curt

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/25/2003 6:16 PM

mjd3

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Hi! Why don't you just post it publicly so all can benifit? That's what this place is for, ya know?

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/25/2003 10:36 PM

mulligan

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Homemade Li-ion charger??? Can you say, "BOOM?"

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 1:09 AM

JohnVH

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haha, no doubt! Ill stick to my BPP SC2

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 1:39 AM

Avistar23

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post the schematic to it....

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 3:15 AM

JohnW

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They won't go BOOM (OK, probably won't go boom.) There is nothing magical about charging Li-Po. All you need is a charger that limits output above a certain voltage. I have a home made dual charger I made for about $15 with RadioShack parts. I have two outputs, it is selectable form 1 to 3 cells, and charge rate is selectable from 50ma to 1000 ma in 50ma increments, independently on both channels. I use it all the time to charge my 1000mah and 2000mah Li-Po packs. Probably over 100 cycles now. Nothing went boom. It works just fine.

My charger isn't a slick as a charger that uses a ready made Li-Po charging IC. Mine slowly reduces charging current as the cutoff voltage is reached. Once cutoff voltage is reached, the packs are floated at that voltage. The purpose built ICs tend to charge at a higher rate longer and then quickly shut down... all this really does is just shorten the time required to fully charge the pack. In other words, my home built charger will fill a 1000 mah pack to 90% in say an hour, just like the brand name chargers, but it will take my charger another hour to get the last 10% into the battery while the IC based charger would only take another 10 minutes or so. I get around this extra wait by only using the brand name charger for finishing the packs off that I charged to 90% on my home made charger... mainly becasue I don't like to wait. If I left the pcak on my home made charger, they would charge to full eventually and then the charger floats the pack, i.e., you could leave the pack on forever without causing damage.

When I get home, I'll open my charger up to see what I did to build the circuit... I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think I used an adjustable voltage regulator with feedbacks to set charging current and cutoff voltage.

Cheers

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 4:27 AM

JohnW

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The only schematics I have for my charger is an AutoCAD file I used to etch the board... not terribly helpful. However, it is very similar to this one that I found on the web. Basically a voltage regulator with feedback loop to set cutoff voltage and a resistor network to limit charging current.

http://shdesigns.dyndns.org/pdf/lionchg3.pdf

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 6:42 AM

Billiam411

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how much did it cost?

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 10:06 AM

JohnW

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The one I built is a little different from the schematic I linked to above. I have a stock of elec stuff like caps, resistors, voltage regs, etc. so I don't really know what I have in mine. I'd guess maybe $25 to $30 for the dual output version I made. I'd think one could build a single output for under $20 and a couple hours work. The LM317 is very cheap... like 50 cents in quantity 1. The transistors are probably a dime or less, might have a buck in resistors, .01uf caps are probably 1 cent each, etc. My guess is the switches will be the most expensive part of the charger listed in the posted schematic.

Cheers

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 9:54 PM

mulligan

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[QUOTE]Originally posted by MonkeyBoy
They won't go BOOM (OK, probably won't go boom.) There is nothing magical about charging Li-Po. All you need is a charger that limits output above a certain voltage. I have a home made dual charger I made for about $15 with RadioShack parts. I have two outputs, it is selectable form 1 to 3 cells, and charge rate is selectable from 50ma to 1000 ma in 50ma increments, independently on both channels. I use it all the time to charge my 1000mah and 2000mah Li-Po packs. Probably over 100 cycles now. Nothing went boom. It works just fine.

My charger isn't a slick as a charger that uses a ready made Li-Po charging IC. Mine slowly reduces charging current as the cutoff voltage is reached. Once cutoff voltage is reached, the packs are floated at that voltage. The purpose built ICs tend to charge at a higher rate longer and then quickly shut down... all this really does is just shorten the time required to fully charge the pack. In other words, my home built charger will fill a 1000 mah pack to 90% in say an hour, just like the brand name chargers, but it will take my charger another hour to get the last 10% into the battery while the IC based charger would only take another 10 minutes or so. I get around this extra wait by only using the brand name charger for finishing the packs off that I charged to 90% on my home made charger... mainly becasue I don't like to wait. If I left the pcak on my home made charger, they would charge to full eventually and then the charger floats the pack, i.e., you could leave the pack on forever without causing damage.

When I get home, I'll open my charger up to see what I did to build the circuit... I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think I used an adjustable voltage regulator with feedbacks to set charging current and cutoff voltage.

Cheers [/QUOTE]

"Probably won't go BOOM"... Geez, I hope you're not in sales anywhere.

There's nothing "magical" about a building a bomb either, but's that's what you've got if you don't do it right. For me, it's silly to introduce that kind of risk to amateurs with "homebuilt" designs. And that's what I and most of us are here when it comes to electrical/circuit design/building- amateurs (if you're not an amateur, chances are you don't need the schematic in the first place- you could design/build your own).

I don't mean to flame anyone- just understand the audience and disclose the risks involved. In any case, I recommend that for Li-ion, folks shell out the few extra bucks to buy from a reputable vendor for safety's sake.

- George

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/26/2003 10:59 PM

JohnW

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"Probably won't go Boom"... any battery can go BOOM. I've only had one LiPo blow up and it happened on a high dollar retail charger, not my home made gizmo... go figure. All it did was just split open (popping noise like a paper bag), stink really bad and it scared the daylights out of the cats.

Any battery can go boom. Buddy of mine burnt down half his house charging a NiCd on a wall wart. It happened at night while he was sleeping and he almost lost his life.

By "Magical" I mean it isn't rocket science. If you are adept enough to understand the schematic and build the circuit, you will be fine IMO. If the schematic is above your head or you lack the fabrication skills (board layout, soldering, etc.) by all means, don't build this circuit. Get a retail charger instead. In many respects, LiPos are easier to charge compared to NiCd/NiMH. LiPos use a cutoff voltage, not peak detection. This makes a safe high current charging circuit very simple to design and build for LiPos.

The primary risk with charging any battery is fire. With this or any charger, don't leave the batteries unattended.

No flame taken... but I think you are being over cautious... But I suppose that is better than not being cautious enough.

Once again, if you don't understand this circuit... don't build it. If you do understand it, give it a try. It does work.

Cheers

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/27/2003 5:49 AM

PowerfLite

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If you are interested in building a "smart" Li-Ion charger that will work with any type of Li-Ion cell (cylindrical, prismatic or poly) visit the Texas Instruments website.

Use this link ( http://focus.ti.com/docs/search/paramsearch.jhtml?familyId=411&tfsection=param_table&templateId=2&showAssociated=false) to review all the charge control IC's made by TI. You will find they also have charge IC's for Ni-Cd, Ni-MH and Lead-Acid chemistries too. If you find something of interest, select a chip then open the application notes and in each document you will find a schematic for the device and a suggested circuit that the device will operate.

You can find similar charge IC's on the National Semiconductor and Analog Devices sites, as well as several others. We use several of these charge IC's and they work quite well.

Hope this helps.

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/27/2003 5:50 AM

PowerfLite

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If you are interested in building a "smart" Li-Ion charger that will work with any type of Li-Ion cell (cylindrical, prismatic or poly) visit the Texas Instruments website.

Use this link ( http://focus.ti.com/docs/search/par...ssociated=false) to review all the charge control IC's made by TI. You will find they also have charge IC's for Ni-Cd, Ni-MH and Lead-Acid chemistries too. If you find something of interest, select a chip then open the application notes and in each document you will find a schematic for the device and a suggested circuit that the device will operate.

You can find similar charge IC's on the National Semiconductor and Analog Devices sites, as well as several others. We use several of these charge IC's and they work quite well.

Hope this helps.

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 6/27/2003 7:38 PM

lennyk

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While you are at the TI website see if you can build a 4 port charger which can cycle, fast charge then trickle etc

Build it before 9:00am sometime in July

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Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 7/6/2003 7:15 AM

shenion

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The pdf file linked to in a earlier post is not my simplest design. Check out: http://shdesigns.org/lionchg.html

The 2 simpler desigs have a fixed voltage/current.

Please do not post just the link to the pdf. Link to the main page as it has a lot of information on how it works and how to modify it for different battery configurations.

This charger is simple and works as long as you do not deep discharge the batts. I know dozens of these chargers have been built. Over the last few years I have gotten many emails from those who have built the charger.

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 10/28/2003 6:00 AM

noalibi2004

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alrigh... ive been looking into the lithium ion battery systems for a while now. I have found them a fairly cheap replacement for Ni-Cd batteries. I have found on surplus sites brand new 2 cell 1200 mah batteries with full protection circuitry for under $10.00!!!! really cheap if you ask me .... they also offer a charger specifically made for these batteries that appears to be simply a transformer that plugs into the wall with no voltage regulator of any kind.. there is no further documentation on the battery or the charger... i believe one was a jvc camcorder pack that had 2 3.6 volt 1250 mah cells in it and one was a qualcomm 7.2 volt pack that held 1200 mah. i guess the entire point of this post is ... you were saying Li-po...(meaning lithium polymer?) is this the same as a normal Li-ion battery pack that i am refering to or am i simply having a massive brain fart. i would deffinately like to use your charging circuit since it is very simple easy and cheap (considering i have almost all the parts already) any info is greatly appreciated. oh and the link to that schematic was from John william and the link was

http://shdesigns.dyndns.org/pdf/lionchg3.pdf

-Brian-

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 1/21/2004 3:14 AM

spyder0069

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Definately never hurts to post something that is homemade. If people don't understand it or feel it is above them then they should stick to purchased products. For those of use electrically inclined it gives us a great project (even though sometimes they exceed the price of a purchased one). I have built peak detection chargers in the past that worked great! You would be surprised how easy and inexpensive it is to create your own electronics for r/c once you learn to program microcontrollers. Some of the projects I have built are:

Lightweight lighting system for electrics that can be activated by a channel on the radio.
Retract controller to slow servo retracts for scale appearance
Digital Peak charger for nimh and nicad with LCD readout
On board glow driver with throttle setpoints
Servo exerciser (use this one all the time when cleaning servo potentiometers)
channel mixers for cheap radios
electric speed controls
loggers that measure rx battery voltage and ambient temperature

The list goes on and on. Most of these I can program a cheap $3 pic microcontroller to control everything. So with about $5 cost you can have a $60 retract controller, ect. Its ridiculous what some of these companies charge and most of the time they have horrible designs if you reverse engineer their products. Anyway to get back to the original topic the lm317 is a popular positive voltage regulator that radio shack actually carries and it runs with a feedback loop of resistors. A great idea that would be easy to implement would be to use one of those digital variable resistors that maxim/dallas semiconductor came out with. Then you could use any microcontroller and eliminate all the switches. You can use a Dallas Semiconductor DS2436 chip to track voltage and temp of the batteries for a safety. You could put this circuit together for less than $20.

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 1/28/2004 4:43 PM

truongtiep

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Dear to all,

It won't go "BOOM" or it will go "BOOM"; depend on you when you built your own charger, what so ever. The important thing is the voltage and curent of the battery and charger must be close together, especialy the curent. ( ampere or I ), if the curent of charger larger than the curent of battery and you let it charge without attention: BOOM !!!.

However, when you built your own charger, I expect you have had some knowledges about electronic. And If you don't know must about it, stick with whatever you got. I save alot of money when I built my own charger just like some gentlement on this subject.

On the web, alot of schematics for charger, battery monitor, low battery switching, low battery arlarm,........ just type the words on yahoo , you will get it.

The purpose of this page is sharing the knowledge , learn together not HIT together.
I don't know what kind of schematic you want for Li-Ion charger, alot of different, cheap, expensive, easy or complicate. Of course more expensive and complicate it will take care your battery better.

Have a good day.
TST

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 1/28/2004 7:49 PM

mglavin

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quote:

ORIGINAL: noalibi2004

alrigh... ive been looking into the lithium ion battery systems for a while now. I have found them a fairly cheap replacement for Ni-Cd batteries. I have found on surplus sites brand new 2 cell 1200 mah batteries with full protection circuitry for under $10.00!!!! really cheap if you ask me .... they also offer a charger specifically made for these batteries that appears to be simply a transformer that plugs into the wall with no voltage regulator of any kind.. there is no further documentation on the battery or the charger... i believe one was a jvc camcorder pack that had 2 3.6 volt 1250 mah cells in it and one was a qualcomm 7.2 volt pack that held 1200 mah. i guess the entire point of this post is ... you were saying Li-po...(meaning lithium polymer?) is this the same as a normal Li-ion battery pack that i am refering to or am i simply having a massive brain fart. i would deffinately like to use your charging circuit since it is very simple easy and cheap (considering i have almost all the parts already) any info is greatly appreciated. oh and the link to that schematic was from John william and the link was

http://shdesigns.dyndns.org/pdf/lionchg3.pdf

-Brian-

Lithium-Ion and Lithium-Poly require the same charge regimen. The only caveat that I am aware of is the Ion cells don't like to be fast charged or discharged to minimum levels regularly, this could be construed as a compromise for cell life. They simply live longer if used within these parameters, same philosophy applies to Poly.

Typical charge parameters for Lithium Poly are C1, while Lithium-Ions like C/10.

"C" is noted as the batteries capacity rating in mA.

To calculate charge requirements:

1250mA(C)/1000=1.25A, C1= 1.25Ax1=1.25Amp charge
1250mA(C)/1000=1.25A, C/10= 1.25/10=.12Amp charge or .12x1000=120mA.

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/1/2004 11:30 PM

Cozmicray

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Your cel phone, Laptop computer, MP3 player are charging in your house,
they are Li ion or Li-poly --- don't hear much about "boom" in those.

Charge properly for type of cell you are charging.
Build in a temperature sensing circuit to shut charging down if temp to hot.

Hey short out any type of high current battery and you got a fire!

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/6/2004 12:53 AM

rsrogers

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Excellent Job Curt! Dont let anyone discourage you. Granted there is alot of people who dont have the knowledge (or want it bad enough) to build such a thing. Everyone thinks if it dosent have a big name brand on it, it just wont do. What they dont realize is those things started out as projects in someones shop also. In order for it to be new technology - the technology couldnt have exsisted!! I've been building my own battery chargers for years & I've never had an electrical class in my life. If you want the knowledge its out there!! In first joining RCU I tried to pass along schematics & tips but it didnt have a name brand on it so - - - .
Since building my own chargers (knock on wood) no battery failures yet.

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/7/2004 2:58 PM

SeenMCrash

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Hello all, I have a question. Could this charger be modified to charge NiMH and NiCD? Could I just adjust the potentiometer to the proper voltage? If so, what would the proper voltages be for 6, 7, 8, cell NiCD and NiMH? Thanks, Andrew

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/9/2004 5:42 AM

shenion

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quote:

ORIGINAL: SeenMCrash

Hello all, I have a question. Could this charger be modified to charge NiMH and NiCD? Could I just adjust the potentiometer to the proper voltage? If so, what would the proper voltages be for 6, 7, 8, cell NiCD and NiMH? Thanks, Andrew

No, NiMH and NiCad require a different charge method.

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/15/2004 9:10 PM

AtomicMods

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The Scott Henion design charger linked to above works like a charm. I have built many of these and I sell them on my site at www.AtomicMods.com I just built 3 nmore this weekend. It is a very simple but effective circuit that works perfect everytime and has an adjustable final voltage target.

I also sell a variety of other Lithium Ion components, let me know if you have any questions. Also the cells I sell have a burst disc that ruptures to avoid exploding.

< Message edited by RobertByrd -- 2/15/2004 3:12:41 PM >

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RE: Home made Lithium Ion battery charger - 2/18/2004 9:56 AM

Pilotsmoe

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quote:

ORIGINAL: SeenMCrash

Hello all, I have a question. Could this charger be modified to charge NiMH and NiCD? Could I just adjust the potentiometer to the proper voltage? If so, what would the proper voltages be for 6, 7, 8, cell NiCD and NiMH? Thanks, Andrew

there is a diagram on this page for a nicad charger with peak detect
http://www.meridianelectronics.ca/gadgets/gadgets.htm

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