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A project log for No-Worries Parallel Battery Charging Station

A safe (and better) alternative to parallel battery charging .

bud-bennettBud Bennett 03/10/2021 at 03:210 Comments

Not much to report about with these new PCBs, but I did learn something.

I added a LED to report the charging status of each battery. Unfortunately, I did not account for how dominant the BAT1 connection is. Here is the problem:

  1. If BAT1 is not the highest voltage of all the connected batteries, then when the charger begins to charge the unpopulated battery LEDs light up. I expected this.
  2. If Bat1 is the highest voltage of all connected batteries, then when the charger begins to charge, the unpopulated battery LEDs are not lit. I did not expect this, but it is not really a problem since the user knows which batteries are populated and can discount any activity from the LEDs of unpopulated batteries.

It is still better to know which batteries are charging and which are not. 

The addition of resistors into the GND connection of the balance leads did not cure the problem of the charger claiming that the battery was reverse polarity when the last battery was removed from the parallel charging station.

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