Inductive charging
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What I want.. and may do one of these days, is to bring the battery connections out to the LED/Ash end. Possibly/probably with a center recessed positive connection, and then just take some paint off of the outside of the battery casing to create the negative "ring". Then I can make a simple little desktop receiver with a well-hole in it (like the internals of the 510 PCC). Instead of laying the PV on my desk when I'm not using it, I stand it vertically in the receiver. It will hold the PV for easy access, and will be charging it at the same time. The vaping vs not-vaping duty cycle is pretty low. I'm willing to bet that even on my 510 I can make it through the whole day on one battery.
If you can't visualize the PV mod, take a look at the power connector for your laptop computer. The hole in your laptop is my "receiver" and the plug is the LED end of my PV.
Sounds to me like you could make that mod pretty quickly with a 510 connector, a PCC, and a little modding on the LED end of a battery. If I am not mistaken, some of the 510 PCCs are a 'push-in' type, rather than a screw in type... therefore you could re-wire the bottom / LED end of your battery with just another connector, turn your LED into a little 'cap module' that would fit over it when not on the charger, then when you are done vaping, pop off your LED, and drop it down into the 'charger' aka PCC.
Start of an idea anyway
Take care,
- Hap
Sounds to me like you could make that mod pretty quickly with a 510 connector, a PCC, and a little modding on the LED end of a battery. If I am not mistaken, some of the 510 PCCs are a 'push-in' type, rather than a screw in type... therefore you could re-wire the bottom / LED end of your battery with just another connector, turn your LED into a little 'cap module' that would fit over it when not on the charger, then when you are done vaping, pop off your LED, and drop it down into the 'charger' aka PCC.
Start of an idea anyway
Take care,
- Hap
Yup... I think we're on the same page. Except I don't want anything that I pop on or pop off. I'll built it into the end of the battery (maybe even figure out a way to keep the LED). When I set my PV down in-between vapes I will set it down "in" the charger. It will charge for a few minutes and then I'll pick it up again to vape. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Generally speaking, Li batteries don't mind this kind of "re-topping-off" for charging.... And probably 35 mnutes of every hour my PV is just sitting on the desk. It might as well be charging when it's not hanging out of my mouth!
Ah ok I see - well shoot that shouldn't be too hard, fish a wire up and tack solder to under side of positive lead of your current battery connector. Reconnect to tube. using a plastic washer or other spacer, create a good solid mountfor a pin in the bottom of battery, mount a hard pin that will just stick through the bottom of your LED cap or even be flush with it.
Then mod your PCC so the negative exterior flange is high enough (if it is not already) so that when you drop your cig down in their "LED first" the pin will hit center contact, etc. Done!
You can also buy conductive foam and make a little dimple for the center pin in the bottom of your recepticle to make it nice and easy for that 'drop in' connection to make center contact.
Take care,
- hap
Ah ok I see - well shoot that shouldn't be too hard, fish a wire up and tack solder to under side of positive lead of your current battery connector. Reconnect to tube. using a plastic washer or other spacer, create a good solid mountfor a pin in the bottom of battery, mount a hard pin that will just stick through the bottom of your LED cap or even be flush with it.
Then mod your PCC so the negative exterior flange is high enough (if it is not already) so that when you drop your cig down in their "LED first" the pin will hit center contact, etc. Done!
You can also buy conductive foam and make a little dimple for the center pin in the bottom of your recepticle to make it nice and easy for that 'drop in' connection to make center contact.
Take care,
- hap
BINGO! We're on the same page. I'm gonna do this. Just not today!
Yea that does sound slick peoples. not quite inductive, but nearly the same level of convenience! I almost cant wait for a battery to die so I can rip it apart and find out how everything pieces together.
Basically the same way a passthrough works. It even goes through a hole in the LED cap. At least on a 901 passthrough.
correct
Correct again..critical points here: Only passes AC..so conversion circuitry as well as inductive pickup circuitry are required in the device being charged...the size of the charger isn't a real issue, but the size of the e-cig is! Required components will be a killer size/weight issue.
Elements are relatively fixed: again..extremely fixed for broadcast power, and in very close relationship to each other..inductive coupling only works short distances with anything like efficiency.
"Tuned RF capacitive transfer"....Part of the tuning involves device placement... If you've ever fooled around with RF amplifers or Tesla coils you know this to be an issue...the "tuning" is kinda critical....and a lot of the tuning is component placement relative to each other..including primary/secondary coil placement
Devices are on the market now that snap on the back of your Ipod or Iphone etc etc to charge them...but they must be laid on the special pad to charge..and worse..the "snap on" bit is darn near as bulky as the phone/ipod itself
Precicely..however the physical size of the coil is not really an object of envy... and you can bet its not one iota larger than it needs to be.
The power transferred is not exactly an object of envy either...pretty light by e-cig standards
Yea, a larger pickup coil is of course prefered. But a small diode and cap can half wave rectify the circuit without much bulk. Now I am curious about how well a coil wound around a current batter (ie batter core coil) would pick up from a spiral pad coil?
The previous design I played with was spiral coil picked up inductively by a small coil and rectified. This took up virtually no space in the mouse, but was horrible ineffective. On the range of leaving a computer on 24/7 to keep 2 AA batteries in a mouse charged up. The bright side was the conversion was dirt cheap.
ref:
Ghetto Inductive Charged Wireless Mouse
functional:
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/arnoldpad/arnold.htm
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Since my analytical and empirical experience with inductive charging is completely inconsistent with some of the opinions expressed here, I decided to revisit the topic... more out of engineering curiosity than anything else.
I partially dissected my old Braun "Ultra" circa the mid 90's IIRC. It's still working and I used it daily, so I didn't want to completely kill it.
The unit uses a dual concentric inductive coil setup with the receiver coil being about .5" in diameter. Too large for PV applications, but not off by an order of magnitude or anything. The nominal air gap between the primary and secondary coupling coils is about .13", controlled and maintained by the molded plastic features of the handle and the base.
The maximum current output that I could get from the coupled coil was 185mA at 5.7VAC (60Hz). Substantially more than the "guess" that it would be in the 20mA range. And plenty of current for charging PV-style batteries.
The charge control circuit on this thing is pretty antiquated.. but then again, it's probably 15 years old. It uses a larger component count than one would see today, but all of the components are SMT. At first blush, all that should be required is a full wave bridge (SOT packaging), the charge controller (probably TSSOP-6 or TSSOP-8), and perhaps an external FET (depending on the current carrying capability of the charge controller). That's about the same component count and size as we currently see in the Li protection circuitry, or the Hall Effect vacuum switch circuit for some automatic batteries.
So, I'd say that all of this is probably "do-able", and from a tinkerers perspective it's intriguing. But from a product perspective it will probably never happen. As has already been mentioned, by just bringing the contacts out through the LED end of the battery, you can get almost all of the same "bang" with a heck of a lot less fuss.
I partially dissected my old Braun "Ultra" circa the mid 90's IIRC. It's still working and I used it daily, so I didn't want to completely kill it.
The unit uses a dual concentric inductive coil setup with the receiver coil being about .5" in diameter. Too large for PV applications, but not off by an order of magnitude or anything. The nominal air gap between the primary and secondary coupling coils is about .13", controlled and maintained by the molded plastic features of the handle and the base.
The maximum current output that I could get from the coupled coil was 185mA at 5.7VAC (60Hz). Substantially more than the "guess" that it would be in the 20mA range. And plenty of current for charging PV-style batteries.
The charge control circuit on this thing is pretty antiquated.. but then again, it's probably 15 years old. It uses a larger component count than one would see today, but all of the components are SMT. At first blush, all that should be required is a full wave bridge (SOT packaging), the charge controller (probably TSSOP-6 or TSSOP-8), and perhaps an external FET (depending on the current carrying capability of the charge controller). That's about the same component count and size as we currently see in the Li protection circuitry, or the Hall Effect vacuum switch circuit for some automatic batteries.
So, I'd say that all of this is probably "do-able", and from a tinkerers perspective it's intriguing. But from a product perspective it will probably never happen. As has already been mentioned, by just bringing the contacts out through the LED end of the battery, you can get almost all of the same "bang" with a heck of a lot less fuss.
There was a video on TED I saw a while back: Eric Giler demos wireless electricity. The dude talks about wireless electricity, and powers a TV and phone from maybe 8-10ft away. Cool stuff.
Scottbee,
If you haven't already reassembled the toothbrush. Can you determine the power consumed by your primary, vs the power achieved at the secondary? This would provide people with a better idea of how much power gets lost via this method of charging. Or maybe show it to be viable! Because one huge advantage of inductive charging, as shown by the powermats that are now available, is multiple items charging at the point. If I had a power mat for my cellphone and PSP (which I dont own) delving into inductive charging of my E-Cig would make a lot more sense.
If you haven't already reassembled the toothbrush. Can you determine the power consumed by your primary, vs the power achieved at the secondary? This would provide people with a better idea of how much power gets lost via this method of charging. Or maybe show it to be viable! Because one huge advantage of inductive charging, as shown by the powermats that are now available, is multiple items charging at the point. If I had a power mat for my cellphone and PSP (which I dont own) delving into inductive charging of my E-Cig would make a lot more sense.
LameBMX,
Not that I don't love trees and stuff.. but honestly, what do I care about the absolute efficiency of the coupling method? If the inductive coupling can charge the cell at a 2C or 3C or 4C rate.... and fit within the aesthetic envelope.... then what else do I want? Trust me, the existing PV pulg-in chargers aren't exactly the model of efficiency either.
In this specific case, wasted power would most likely manifest itself as heat. Neither the charger base or the handpiece on my Braun get noticeably warm during the charging process. So we're not talking Watts and Watts of waste.
Sorry to revive this aging thread, but I'm very interested in this topic. I'm actually new to vaping, but I've been thinking about a desktop charger like this since I first heard about PVs and my brother showed me his passthrough. I was happy to see I'm not the only one who's thought of it, but disappointed to find no actual product yet.
I really think the ideal setup would be something that I can just casually place my PV on and know that it will always have a full charge the next time I pick it up, but without the hassle of having it connected by a wire. It's like the ashtray version of the PCC (I'm not the first to think of that either, but it's apt).
Based on my research, it seems like this is getting cheaper and more practical every day. On the subject of consumer products that could be reused/cannabalized, take a look at the Energizer Induction WiiMote charger (gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?sku=804031&affid=9797t). WAY less expensive than a powermat, but I'm guessing it could still put out enough power to trickle charge a PV battery. It seems like the battery size could easily be reduced to make more room for the coil, or just go with a box mod like the Bartleby.
@Scottbee, have you played around with this idea any more? Any interest in investigating it further with me?
I really think the ideal setup would be something that I can just casually place my PV on and know that it will always have a full charge the next time I pick it up, but without the hassle of having it connected by a wire. It's like the ashtray version of the PCC (I'm not the first to think of that either, but it's apt).
Based on my research, it seems like this is getting cheaper and more practical every day. On the subject of consumer products that could be reused/cannabalized, take a look at the Energizer Induction WiiMote charger (gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?sku=804031&affid=9797t). WAY less expensive than a powermat, but I'm guessing it could still put out enough power to trickle charge a PV battery. It seems like the battery size could easily be reduced to make more room for the coil, or just go with a box mod like the Bartleby.
@Scottbee, have you played around with this idea any more? Any interest in investigating it further with me?
Seraph,
Just a bit of an update.
I played with my Braun a bit more because the motor in it ultimately died. The coil in the base of the unit (pictures available upon request) is almost the perfect size for embedding in the bottom of a mod like the Screwdriver or Chuck. And if one were to do that, then it would be a pretty slick setup. In-between vapes.. just set the thing on the base... just like the cordless toothbrush. The inductive charger coil (along with some of the circuitry) would keep the battery topped off, and overnight it could do a complete recharge.
This wouldn't be hard to implement at all.
Just a bit of an update.
I played with my Braun a bit more because the motor in it ultimately died. The coil in the base of the unit (pictures available upon request) is almost the perfect size for embedding in the bottom of a mod like the Screwdriver or Chuck. And if one were to do that, then it would be a pretty slick setup. In-between vapes.. just set the thing on the base... just like the cordless toothbrush. The inductive charger coil (along with some of the circuitry) would keep the battery topped off, and overnight it could do a complete recharge.
This wouldn't be hard to implement at all.
Very cool! Looking forward to hearing more. Definitely send me the pics if you have a chance. I guess if it works, the next question is how hard it would be to build these from scratch, or find something to cannibalize that's not so expensive.
Just make sure its a plastic chuck or screwdriver. or a non-magnetic metal. wrapping your coil in a magnetic shield (metal) would really impede its performance. The metal will absorb the magnetism, preventing it from moving electrons in the pickup coil.
The B-field on the Braun charger is pretty much localized and it only couples at the very base of the brush. If you were going to put it on the bottom of the Chuck or the like, it would be an extension off of the end, and you would want a bit of separation from the base of the Chuck (like .150") to avoid the "shorted turn".
Materials like aluminum, 300 series SST and copper/brass have very low magnetic permeability (they don't effect the actual field)... but they'll still give you grief since the current can be induced into the material and it will act like a short (hence the term "shorted turn").
Materials like aluminum, 300 series SST and copper/brass have very low magnetic permeability (they don't effect the actual field)... but they'll still give you grief since the current can be induced into the material and it will act like a short (hence the term "shorted turn").
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