[Expo-tech] Drill chargers

[Wookey]

I finaly got round to fettling the drill batteries, after sorting the
cavelink, and upgraded the 3 DIY-chargers from 'gaffer' to a nice Ali
strut before realising that only one of the 3 is working. Doh! Simple
replacements are largely unobtanium now and I've not found an obvious
replacement (there are scores of nice chargers that will do a good job
after some button-pushing, but very few that do balance-charging on
plugging-in.

I did make another charger whilst waiting for this one to get back to
Cambridge so we can easilyhave two if someone has a spare 4S lithium
charger with banana plug outputs - e.g an accucell6, or we could use
one of the yellow propower one on expo, but we know they are prone to
very slow start.

Anyone got a spare accucell6 or similar? I could ask on the main list.

Or I could buy myself swanky new iSDT charger like the SC-608 and lend
expo my accucell6 so long as someone promises to make sure it comes
back! 

An expo accucell6 (in the UK so we have a fighting change of getting
it by Thursday) is £37. (I got mine for £24 a decade ago!) So I could
just buy one of those. Is our budget OK for that?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Turnigy-Accucel-6-V2-50w-6A-RC-Balance-Charger-Power-Supply-LiPo-NiMh-iMax/221665353019?_trkparms=aid%3D555018%26algo%3DPL.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20140122125356%26meid%3Da8b1a37e388243e4a5075b32c23d9c72%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D12%26mehot%3Dag%26sd%3D223296166054%26itm%3D221665353019&_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851

There are much fancier chargers now for not much more money (like that
iSDT SC608), but we know the accucell one works well and expo doesn't
really want fancy - it wants idiot-proof. Also the iSRT chargers all
use differnt connectors, which is more things to sort at too-short
notice.

I'll spend the rest of today trying to fix the chargers we've got, but
I don't rate my chances very high, given no time to buy spares. Maybe
they were discontinued because they just weren't very good.

Sorry I didn't notice this earlier. Thought I just had some batteries
to fettle (mostly done - one to go), and the casing to make less
crap/missing LEDs to solder in.

If anyone can find a physicaly-small 50+W automatic balance charger
for 4S available in time to solder it in place later this week then
that would be good. (The existing ones are the the Turnigy B4 (only
35W and PITA to put in place).

Oh and I did some more MPPT controller testing with a biger PSU (60V5A) and it
still worked as it should. So it does mostly work fine...

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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