Client marketplaces, together with Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress, are completely inundated with sellers peddling fraudulent merchandise. That’s very true for batteries, as a result of most customers lack the data and instruments to check them. In the event you purchase lithium batteries (or merchandise that comprise them), there’s a excellent likelihood you’re getting scammed and the batteries can have, on the very least, a lot decrease capacities than specified. The outcome might be something from an annoyance to a professional hazard. To forestall that, Open Inexperienced Power designed this DIY 18650 battery tester anybody can construct.
The aim of this system is to offer makers the flexibility to simply check 18650 lithium batteries to confirm their capacities. If a vendor advertises their batteries as one thing like 9900mAh, you should utilize the tester to test that. It will provide you with a fairly correct estimate of the particular capability, comparable to 3500mAh. On this instance situation, you’d return the batteries and keep away from that vendor sooner or later. If the capability matches the specs, you then’re good to go. However you could be shocked to seek out what number of sellers are mislabeling their batteries.
Open Inexperienced Power beforehand shared an analogous system, the Battery Capability Tester V2.1. Its job was to soundly discharge 18650 batteries (or every other batteries) and measure the overall energy used. Assuming the battery began at a full cost, that’s the battery’s capability. However that system couldn’t cost the batteries, which was a little bit of an inconvenience.
To make issues a bit simpler, this new model can each discharge and cost 18650 lithium batteries. It will possibly solely work with one battery at a time (it could be harmful in any other case), however it’s good for testing random samples from newly bought batches.
The tester is constructed on a customized PCB that hosts a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 growth board. It shows the standing and measured information on a small OLED display screen. As a result of the ESP32 has onboard Bluetooth and WiFi, it could be potential to create a smartphone app to work with the tester sooner or later. For now, it has just a few modes and essentially the most helpful, in our opinion, is the “Analyze” mode. That brings the battery as much as a full cost, then fully discharges it (to the protected voltage degree) to find out the battery’s capability. That makes battery testing so simple as potential.