DSD to Turnigy Accucell 6 balance charger mod

From richud.com
Jump to navigation Jump to search


The original 18650/16340 DSD charger

The original piece of crap charger on the inside, image kindly borrowed from this candlepower forums post

Dsd charger inside.jpg

The Mod

Seemed a much better idea to use it as a holder for batteries to charge on the Turnigy Accucell 6. This is simple but looks complicated as lots of wires!

This allows to charge a single: 18650 or 16340(CR123) or AA or AAA.

This allows balance charging 2 x 18650 or 2 x 16340.

This basically converts it from Parallel to series charging + single cell charging via side addons (optional!)


  1. Remove the circuit board and desolder the leads.
  2. Very carefully mill/grind out the thin nickel coated steel? bridging joints - a Dremmel type tool very useful, (one from ALDI sufficed here ;)
  3. Connect + to -'ive ends of one of the parallel cells with a stiff copper wire (makes it easy to do) - inside of an old analogue TV coax cable good here. [If you do this the right way around the + and - ends marked in the charger stay correct.] Soldering to the Nickel may be hard you ideally want some decent flux. - I used Carr's Green Flux
  4. Using whatever suits you best attach AA, AAA, 16340, 18650 battery holders around the side. I couldn't find anywhere selling 18650 battery holders so have to cut a 16340 one in half and VERY carefully work out the spacing to take a 18650. These were all screwed in using screws with the flattest and thinnest heads I could find, screws from an old Dell laptop. (Simply drilled appropriately sized holes and force screwed them in making them self tap.)
  5. Battery holders simply wire up to the + and -'ive entry points.
  6. Slip heatshrink over the banana power lead and balance lead wire and put in where the old power jack was.
  7. Solder a balance lead to +'ve and -'ive and the 'blue' wire to the middle.
  8. Solder a banana lead in to the +'ve and -'ive (get 4mm banana to banana from eBay and chop in half, cheapest way to get gold connectors and decent build quality)
  9. Zap heatshrink with your favorite gas burner - this thing is awesome!
  10. Glue bottom back on with plastic cement (think it is ABS or something similar that is easy to weld)

Dsd charger balance mod wiring.JPG


Balance charging two 18650's extracted from a Toshiba laptop battery pack.

The power supply is also from a Toshiba laptop, the connector having to be carefully ground smaller to fir in the Turnigy.

Turnigy charger balance mod 18650.JPG

IMPORTANT WARNING

Charging NiMH single battery - it wont cut off!

There is something wrong with the Turnigy - apparently it will only cut off with high current to it (0.4ma on a single AAA wasnt enough) and you will also need to lower the peak delta cutoff - I haven't experimented with these suggestions yet so be warned!!!

References

Candlepower forums post about DSD charger Wikipedia List of battery sizes