Tag: electronic load

Hacker Eco-X TopFuel 5000mAh 6S 111Wh 20C LiPo battery pack (WHL #31)

Hey! What’s the thing that this blog needs the most?

Yep! Another battery post! :mrgreen:

So, last one of the big lithium batteries today. We have a Hacker (nice brand name!) “TopFuel LiPo 20C-ECO-X 5000mAh 6S” unit. I think this could be the first item to carry an EAN number (4250320228615) on the label – and it very well might be the first one where the manufacturer that directly sells these puppies (for 93€ a piece) does not appear on the first 100 Google results on exactly this number. That’s a pretty shitty rank for a manufacturer AND a web shop, I have to say…

I’m also not sure about the technical details on the shop page. […]


Kokam Lithium Polymer 5S 4000mAh 30C battery (WHL #30)

Yawn. Another battery pack. But also new hardware for the electronic load, so testing conditions have improved :)

Today’s item is a Kokam SLPB 400030-0501K(9543140H5) battery pack. Kokam is one of the big players in lithium polymer batteries, and given the battery was purchased at the same time as the last item, I guess this one wasn’t a cheapie as well. No Wan Hung Lo this time, but after all, it’s not an item that I bought… ;)

It is clearly aimed at RC stuff, having 4000mAh at 30C discharge rate, 18.5V nominal / 21.0V max voltage, 8000mA charging current. […]


A beefy electronic load (#P4F2)

Hello again!

I’ve been asked: What do you do with this electronic load thing? Well, I‘ve been using it as a battery torture device, what else could you do with a variable resistance device…

For a crude first step in actually testing my unit and also classifying a newly harvested set of deeply discharged 18650 cells, I slapped together some minimalistic Arduino program and hooked the thing up in parallel to the battery under test. The electronic load was set to 2 Amps with another battery, which was monitored by the Uni-T 203A current clamp. […]


A beefy electronic load (#P4F1)

Well, that was a long week…actually, it was a fortnight ;)

Here we go!

(the alignment of images really sucks when placed near the header of the post – thanks WordPress!)

So this puppy was manufactured by my new friends over at OSH Park (ordinary order, no extras) and I think I hit the express jackpot. I registered on June 8th and submitted my files – three hours later (1 AM my time on Friday) I already got notice of the panel assignment. Maybe the small size of 54mm x 31mm (2.1″ by 1.2″ for the Yankees out there) just made a perfect fit on the remaining board size and they sent it straight to production ;) As OSH Park charges 5 dollars per square inch of board area (for three units!), […]


A beefy electronic load (#P4)

This is a ranty introduction to the electronic load project – photos, circuits and more will be available in part 2 next week!

So…I’ve been torturing power supplies (and to a lesser extend: batteries) for ages. Usually to check their health status by comparing the current peak performance to the claimed values in the datasheet. Once you see voltage rails dropping where they should not, it’s time for a replacement of the unit, or in case of specialized PSUs, for a swap of the electrolytic caps.

But the crudity of my testing always bothered me – hooking up power resistors, measuring voltage and current, manually connecting and disconnecting the DUT, never hitting exact performance figures because of the limited selection of torture devices I had around. […]