BLANKIN' Blinkin' LED!

[Rykk]

Hi y'all,
A couple of my best batteries recently quit working and are doing something I've never seen: If you take a drag, the LED blinks like 20 times, if you connect it to a charger the LED blinks like 20 times, if you shake them the LED blinks like 20 times!

Real frustrating as these are 2 of the very best batts I have and they've lasted a really long while (relatively). I'm all too used to the typical failure modes - auto-switch quits working, no voltage when you puff, etc. but this one has me puzzled. I seem to remember reading "somewhere" about some sort of counter that limits how many charge/discharge cycles a vaporette battery is allowed to cycle through. Is this true? And, if so, can it be reset? Maybe by either grounding a pin on the 8-pin PIC chip or just disconnecting the battery from the circuit board for a certain amount of time? Or maybe by totally draining the battery to near zero volts?

Any info on this would be helpful - thanks!
Rick

 

[Kurt]

Sounds to me like the batteries are simply dead and are not rechargeable. It happens. Never heard of an intrinsic circuit that allows only a certain number of cycles, but it would n't surprise me if some of the shadier companies want that so you have to buy more batteries sooner, like ink-jet cartridges.

If you have been using low-resistance attys on them, this will shorten the life of any battery compared to regular attys. Sounds to me like its time to get more batteries.

 

[Kent C]

Hi y'all,
A couple of my best batteries recently quit working and are doing something I've never seen: If you take a drag, the LED blinks like 20 times, if you connect it to a charger the LED blinks like 20 times, if you shake them the LED blinks like 20 times!

In a year and a half I've seen that happen on 2 auto batts (510s) that I had. I tried the common 'fix' tap hard on led end and it fixed the one for a while but not long - both ended up toast. Never saw that on others though - just simple deaths.... no parade