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Taichung, Taiwan
friendofmegaman wrote:
katsumbhong wrote:

If it was multi-cell, and you know that they are in a parallel circuit, your question is redundant. Your question is pointless.

Yah as I said I'll manage on my own. Thanks for you help.

LOL!!!

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SLC, UT

That escalated quickly.

I do have a li-ion question though. Generally speaking, if there are only 3 contacts on a battery, is it probable that it has a charging circuit built in? I'm thinking about a psp battery, which, to my knowledge, does have a built in circuit. And is there any good way to confirm/test that without a) blowing the battery (or yourself) up, or b) opening the battery?

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I answered his question earlier.



Stargazer, how many volts does the battery say on it, my guess is it could be 2c2s

Last edited by 12ianma (May 30, 2014 8:00 am)

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SLC, UT

3.7v. I guess maybe I'm incorrectly assuming that if it has a circuit built in, the circuit is a lot more voltage tolerant than the cell itself?

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CA
stargazer wrote:

3.7v. I guess maybe I'm incorrectly assuming that if it has a circuit built in, the circuit is a lot more voltage tolerant than the cell itself?

The voltage written on the battery will be the voltage of the battery independently on whether it has protective circuit or not. So if it's a 3.7V battery with a circuit it will say 3.7V. But you could measure it with the multimeter couldn't you?

Third pin however might or might not indicate the presence of protection. It might be just dummy pin which is quite typical for cheap aftermarket stuff. It could be simple temperature sensor, or smart full-featured protective board. So if you buy a battery from a good source and the battery has the spec - just check with it. Otherwise I don't see how to verify all that without dismantling the battery and even then you need to reverse engineer the board (if one is present) and figure what does it do. Does it protect from both overdischarging of overcharging? Or is it just for discharging. Do you see what I mean?

For example I've got hold of a DSi battery, but have no idea how many cells are there and whether a circuit is there or not. It has 3 pins all right, but it could be a dummy pin attached to ground or always returning OK status. So although I like the form-factor of this battery I won't be using it since I don't have the spec. If say it has more than 1 cell, then I need to take care of how they charge and discharge (balance them in other words) and the way they must be balanced depends on how many fucking cells are there smile

Anyways... this is the stuff I've read from various resources like battery university, but dunno how is it on practice. That's why I brought up this originally, but got no answer apart from accusation of asking pointless questions (it actually becomes quite typical for this forum which is a shame, I guess fantastic expert gurus sitting here won't descent to a noob like me).

Last edited by friendofmegaman (May 30, 2014 6:33 pm)

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SLC, UT

Well I don't really know about all of that, but here's what I'm talking about:

Is it safe to assume that this circuit is a charging circuit? Would a charging circuit be more voltage tolerant than the cell itself?

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CA
stargazer wrote:

Well I don't really know about all of that, but here's what I'm talking about:

Is it safe to assume that this circuit is a charging circuit? Would a charging circuit be more voltage tolerant than the cell itself?

I'd say it's not safe to assume anything in case of LiPo batteries since if you wire them wrong you might end up burning the battery and most likely damage the device. I'm sorry I can't really see what's written on this chip and I'd would be good to know it's specification. As I said it might be temperature sensor. What worries me in this case is that the third pin is there for a reason. It means that something must be wired there to control how the battery charges/discharges.

So to summarize - I wouldn't use the battery unless I know everything about it. Simply for the safety sake. Imagine you left the thing at home at it burned and your desk or whatever caught on fire (or is it too paranoid? O_o). Can you get something similar for you needs from batteryspace? There you can purchase a battery with known number of cells and get a protective boeard for your pack.

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CA

Actually I've just noticed that 12ianma answered my question about parallel cells. I somehow missed it, so my bad, and thanks a lot for the help! smile However it doesn't change the point for stargazer's issue.

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Most of the time you don't need that third "pin" when using litium single cells like cellphone batteries etc. you can buy generic chargers which have sliding pins to touch just the positive and negative terminals.