Author Andrei
26/06/2019
I found a new great battery pack project on instructables by DIY KING 00 and he has been working on motorising his bicycle using a geared DC motor. For that he needs a battery pack. So to make a battery pack he have decided to go with the popular 18650 lithium ion cells from two old hoverboard batteries. Since the cells are from used batteries, he need to balance charge all the cells before making the battery pack. Everytime he use these 18650 cells he need to go through this stage when he needs to balance charge all the cells individually to get them at the same potential.

To get through efficiently he decided to built a dedicated charger for 18650 cells. He also decided to make it a modular charger so that we could add up modules to form a larger grid that enables us to charge as many cells as we want simultaneously.

Since for this pack he wanted the charger to be modular, easy to built and low cost so he came across the TP-4056 lithium cells charging boards that you could find on eBay for a few cents. These boards are specifically made to charge lithium ion cells with a micro USB input, over charging protection and above all they are dirt cheap. For each module he decided to go with two cell holders, each one of which can hold up to four cells.

So for each module we are going to need eight TP-4056 modules. For the main input of the board he used an XT-60 connector but you also have the option for charging two or three cells only using a cell phone charger as well.

He designed the PCB and order it. Once he received that board he started soldering the components by starting with the charging boards and then moved towards the bigger components. The whole project turned out to be a really useful and now he has a customised charger that can charge as many cells that he wants. The whole charging grid costs him a fraction of the price of a professional chargers available in the market and they don't have the capacity to charge as may of them. See more on the original post here.

Apart this post, if you have your own project and you need good quality PCBs, consider using the services of JLCPCB.com which will offer you quite good services, I use their services a lot of my PCBs.

Consider supporting ELECTRONOOBS on PATREEON.