Faster battery charger??

[DaveP]

As a post-script to my above post, I took the charger back to the shop where I'd purchased it (as part of a Lavatube kit) and they gave me a different one. The replacement has the exact same defect. Putting in a battery that's at 3.4 to 3.5v after all full day's use results in only about 165ma charging current, which never increases. Charging still takes around 12 hours.

I'm sure that some TR-001s from different generations will probably work fine. But with two in a row exhibiting the same issue, there's obviously no QC happening at the factory. I suspect that there's probably a whole batch of these units made from the same production run which all exhibit this problem.

Looking forward to receiving my Intellicharge i4 sometime next week.

Mine looks like this and is rated at 500mah. It consistently gives me a +/- 3 hour charge from the 3.5v level. I don't notice that much difference if I let it start from a 3.2v discharged battery. It takes longer, but no more than 4 hours. Maybe the new ones are built differently to charge at a lower level. Does yours say 500mah output on the label?

 

[Joey_P]

Does yours say 500mah output on the label?

Yes, the label on the underside specifies 500ma output. The markings appear identical to those of other TR-001s I've found while searching the web.

With any electronic device that's produced continuously over many years, revisions and changes are inevitable. It's probable that the board has undergone multiple revisions, and possible that somebody screwed up the most recent rev. More probable, my bet is that they simply received an incoming batch of some particular part (such as a shunt resistor used for current measurement) that was either the wrong part or just out of spec, and didn't perform incoming lot inspection.

I work in the electronics manufacturing business (Harris Broadcast audio consoles) and this sort of thing happens from time to time. Most recently, the company which supplies us with ARM9 single-board computers sent us a batch in which the watchdog timer wasn't working. Under the microscope, I found that the FET on the board which drives the reset function (a tiny little SOT-416 surface mount part) had different markings from those on boards that worked. My contact at the manufacturer went out and physically inspected the inventory on the production line, and found that someone in receiving had accidentally slapped the wrong barcode label on one reel from an incoming batch of dual-diode arrays. So even though the reel had a label on it which, to a human, clearly stated that these were diodes, the pick-n-place robot was blindly following the barcode and slapping diodes onto the boards where FETs should have been. (Also, poo on them for not validating the watchdog during functional test.)

 

[DaveP]

Yes, the label on the underside specifies 500ma output. The markings appear identical to those of other TR-001s I've found while searching the web.

With any electronic device that's produced continuously over many years, revisions and changes are inevitable. It's probable that the board has undergone multiple revisions, and possible that somebody screwed up the most recent rev. More probable, my bet is that they simply received an incoming batch of some particular part (such as a shunt resistor used for current measurement) that was either the wrong part or just out of spec, and didn't perform incoming lot inspection.

I work in the electronics manufacturing business (Harris Broadcast audio consoles) and this sort of thing happens from time to time. Most recently, the company which supplies us with ARM9 single-board computers sent us a batch in which the watchdog timer wasn't working. Under the microscope, I found that the FET on the board which drives the reset function (a tiny little SOT-416 surface mount part) had different markings from those on boards that worked. My contact at the manufacturer went out and physically inspected the inventory on the production line, and found that someone in receiving had accidentally slapped the wrong barcode label on one reel from an incoming batch of dual-diode arrays. So even though the reel had a label on it which, to a human, clearly stated that these were diodes, the pick-n-place robot was blindly following the barcode and slapping diodes onto the boards where FETs should have been. (Also, poo on them for not validating the watchdog during functional test.)

I agree that a component mis-pick in ther parts department of a Chinese factory could have resulted in your low charge rate.

You'd have to figure out the load equivalency of a dead battery to determine the charge rate across a resistance, but if it takes 12 hours to charge a 2000mah battery, I'd bet on a good WAG to read in the range of 160 something milliamps. I'd start talking to the supplier for a return and swap. Mine always takes 3 to 4 hours to charge, the 4 hour charge time being on a depleted battery vaped to cutoff.

I was a field engineer for a worldwide business products manufacturer. I serviced 180 PPM high speed laser printers and Sun front ends and servers in corporate and government computer rooms. Your insurance policy or utility bill may have been printed by one of my printers.

 

[Joey_P]

I agree that a component mis-pick in ther parts department of a Chinese factory could have resulted in your low charge rate.

This is clearly a batch defect, I just wonder how big the affected batch is.

You'd have to figure out the load equivalency of a dead battery to determine the charge rate across a resistance, but if it takes 12 hours to charge a 2000mah battery, I'd bet on a good WAG to read in the range of 160 something milliamps.

Your WAG is astoundingly close, and no indirect calculations were required.

I built a little sandwich adapter (a piece of thin cardboard with a strip of copper foil on each side) to go between the battery and the charger, which allowed me to directly measure charge current with an inline milliammeter. Putting in a battery with a starting float voltage of 3.59v, initial charging current was 164ma at 3.61v, rising to 165ma at 3.63v after ten minutes.

I'd start talking to the supplier for a return and swap.

Already did that. After a week, I took the charger back to the local shop where I'd originally gotten it as part of a complete Lavatube kit. They happily exchanged it for a new one. The replacement unit performed almost identically to the original.

180 PPM high speed laser printers

180 PPM? Holy cow!

The closest thing I've ever seen were the big DEC band printers we had in the computer lab when I was in college. I think they were 1200 LPM, but it's been a while. It was impressive to watch the fan-fold paper just fly through those machines, though.

 

[DaveP]

The ones I serviced in my territory looked like this. The picture is of a Xerox 6180 Color Highlight Printer. It's a black and white (monochrome) printer that also has a highlight color used for logos and highlighting of selected lines on the page. It prints from a network or a mainframe channel.

It's uncanny that my WAG matched your actual reading! But, that was the rough estimate I expected in my head calculation.

 

[Joey_P]

That is a stunning piece of hardware. But is that not a DocuTech 180 in the picture?

I assume that the actual imaging unit is picture just to the left of center and that the rest is paper-handling? Hard to fathom 180 PPM. From a software standpoint, does the server have to transmit the complete image definition for every single page, or have we gotten to the point of sophistication at which the printer itself stores a template (what might be called a style sheet in the web world), with the server dumping only that data which is unique to each page?

As an aside, I never realized that the spot-color concept still existed. Learn something new every day.


Anyway, back on topic. I received my new Intellicharge i4 a couple of days ago, and it is a massive improvement. The device claims to be able to deliver 750ma per cell, and that is precisely what I am seeing out of it. Using a battery which I've vaped on all day (initial open-circuit voltage of 3.54v), starting current was 0.77A at 3.65v, ramping to 0.75A at 3.70v after 10 minutes. Total charge time was about 3 hours 20 minutes, with a terminal voltage of 4.21v.

I highly recommend this charger: Amazon.com: NiteCore IntelliCharge i4 - 2nd generation: Electronics