23/12/2018 Open source Lithium battery charger modules

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Open source
Lithium ba ery
charger modules

For a long me I wanted to enter the 21st

century by stopping using NiCad or NiMH
ba eries and upgrading to Lithium
accumulators as they provide more power
per volume and are cool in general.
Constant flow of obsolete cell phones
provides a nice source of reasonably high-
performance ba eries for free - I felt
compelled to tap into this resource for my
ba ery operated projects.

Well, there are a couple of issues you

have to take care of when moving to Li-
ion or LiPoly:

you have to charge them in a par cular

specific way they like
you can’t discharge them below a certain
threshold
oh, yeah, did I men on they blow up
violently if you screw up?

What’s nice about cell phone ba eries is

that they usually come with a protec on
circuitry that protects them when they
are overdischarged and short-circuited.

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23/12/2018 Open source Lithium battery charger modules
Once we tried to blow up a cell phone
ba ery by shor ng it, connec ng to
external power supply in proper polarity,
then in reverse polarity, then directly to
240V - the sucker just didn’t blow up! This
is just how good protec on circuit on cell
phone ba eries is.

Ok, enough of this retarded shit. I needed

a proper way to charge ba eries, and I’ve
chosen USB from a computer as the
primary power source since those are
ubiquitous. So, to get the job done I chose
to test three (essen ally two) popular Li-
ion charging ICs: MAX1551, MAX1555 and
MCP73831.

There are loads of the charger designs

based on these ICs on the net, but I
couldn’t find one that would meet my
requirements:

made in Eagle
DIY toner transfer friendly
charging/finished indica on
jumper/resistor selectable charging
current
op onal USB connector

So I made my own and am pos ng them

online for people to use:
h ps://github.com/Miceuz/USBLiPoCharger

MAX1551 does not provide feedback

about charging status, so there’s no point
talking about it. MAX1555 does provide
charging status though, so I took some
effort to make use of it:

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23/12/2018 Open source Lithium battery charger modules

MAX1555 CHG pin is an open drain

output that goes low while the ba ery is
charging, stays high impedance
otherwise. While the ba ery is charging,
Q1 is off as its gate is pulled low, lucky
combina on of LEDs and MOSFETs
salvaged from some motherboards allows
for Q2 to turn on and light up the
LED_CHARGING. When the CHG pin goes
high impedance, gate of Q1 is pulled up
by R2, Q1 turns on while turning on
LED_CHARGED and pulling down the gate
of Q2.

The MOSFETs I used are of jelly-bean kind

with “702” marking on them, the
LED_CHARGED has a voltage drop of
about 1.6V, this makes a gate voltage of
5V - 1.6V = 3.4V apparently this is enough
for 702 to turn on.

I’ve added a solder jumper that can be

used to change charging current mode.

MCP73831 has a tri-state STAT output,

this makes indica on trivial:

Another nice thing about MCP73831 is

that it provides a possibility to tune the
charging current for the size of your
ba ery - if the ba ery is small, you don’t
want to charge it at very high currents,

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23/12/2018 Open source Lithium battery charger modules
probably you’d aim for 0.8 x ba ery
capacity to be on the safe side. This can
be done by selec ng a suitable resistor on
PROG pin - consult the datasheet. Note
that you can easily violate the USB
specifica on which does not allow for
devices to draw currents higher that
100mA without nego a on. But all the
USB hosts in computers I’ve met usually
don’t care.

I’m not sure about MAX155X, but I can

tell from personal experience that
MCP73831 does not have any internal
protec on form reversed ba ery. It goes
poof! with a ny trace of smoke.

This is a photo of one of my projects - TV-

B-Gone packed into a Nokia phone case
u lising the original ba ery:

This is a photo of a raw phone ba ery cell

charging. The ba ery was old and was
outpu ng no voltage, but a er I ripped
out the protec on circuitry, the cell
showed some 2.5V - just on the edge of
becoming useless. I was able to charge it
without any problems - no hea ng, etc. I

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23/12/2018 Open source Lithium battery charger modules
don’t recommend this way of using old
ba eries, it’s here just to show how
retarded I am.

Published February 02 2013 by miceuz

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Tags: charger 2 electronics 42

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