NiMH Charger For Up To Six Cells


Posted on Feb 5, 2014

It is impossible to imagine present day society without any batteries. Count the number of gadgets in your house that are powered from batteries, you will be stunned by the number of batteries you will find. The majority of these devices use penlight batteries and if you`re a little environmentally conscious you will be using rechargeable batterie


NiMH Charger For Up To Six Cells
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

s. A few years ago these batteries were invariably NiCd types. However, these batteries suffer from a relatively high rate of self-discharge and from the so-called memory-effect. It is now more common to use NiMH batteries. The advantage is that these batteries do not suffer from the memory-effect and generally also have a much higher capacity, so that they last longer before they have to be recharged again. From the above you can conclude that every household these days needs, or could use, a battery charger. A good charger needs to keep an eye on several things to ensure that the batteries are charged properly. For one, the charger has to make sure that the voltage per cell is not too high. It also needs to check the charging curve to determine when the battery is fully charged. If the charging process is taking too long, this is an indication that something is wrong and the charger must stop charging. Sometimes it is also useful to monitor the temperature of the cells to ensure that they do not get too hot. The circuit presented here is intended for charging NiMH batteries. The MAX712 IC used here contains all the necessary functionality to make sure that this happens in a controlled manner. Figure 1 shows the schematic of the charger. The heart of the circuit is easily recognized: everything is arranged around IC1, a MAX712 from Maxim. This IC is available in a standard DIP package, which is convenient for the hobbyist...




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