Making use of old Lithium batteries

Hi,

You can purchase a ready made single cell charger on the auction site, it has mini usb socket and soldermpads to put your own connection wires, best of all it costs around £2.

I use it with some 1850 cells removed from old laptop batteries, I leave it charging over night.

I post some links if anyone's intersted.

V8eng, your method of sorting TVs is the same as Dad used as a Radar mechanic during the war, the shock often got things going. I think the same system was used when he came home and became a radio technician with the NZ Broadcasting Service. It definitely works with valve radios.

Ian S C

This might be a bit extreme but it shows the amount of energy in a small package: **LINK**

I have witnessed the results of a few Lithium battery explosions (Not rechargeable Lithium Ion) and the amount of devastation a single AA sized cell can cause is unbelievable. The AA incident was an accident caused by a single cell being reversed charged in a battery pack and caused personal injury and put a workshop out of action for some time. Other battery explosions I have seen have been controlled experiments and believe me you would not want to drill into a Lithium cell.

If you are going to play with Lithium cells/batteries of any type please take care. If Boeing can get it wrong......

Hello all,

You can see ***HERE*** some consequences of a Lithium Ion battery explosion in my garage/workshop.

Dias Costa

John is right to remind us of the safety issues.

i would contend that using a chip like the Maxim one is the best possible way to make a charger knowing it has a good reliable basis and a glance at the datasheet will show there's very little to go wrong.

Main message has to be don't charge damaged cells and don't try and restore or charge lithium-ion or li-poly with anything other than a charger designed for the task.

Neil