Using the correct charger in the correct way is one of the most important things to do with Lithium batteries, if not the most important. Incorrect charging can lose you more than just the battery.

I was under the impression that any charger made for charging lithium based batteries shut off once charged and balanced since it's dangerous otherwise. What charger were you using?

I use LI-ion cell phone batteries in the Roomba robot, the EZ-B, and the Wifi board. All of the batteries have built in Power control boards that monitor charge and discharge and will open each batteries electrical path if exceeded. That way I get to use the standard NiMH, NiCD power supplies. You can buy bulk cell phone batteries for about $1 each and a lot of them have 1200 to 1600 mAH capacity. Then it's just a matter of series/parallel arrangements to obtain the voltage and current needed for your projects.

I plan to do similar on my next project, do they have auto cut off circuits to stop over discharge too?

I'm working on an auto cut off circuit for my current batteries since they don't have them built in (which seems stupid to me for the price of a diode, resistor and mosfet)

We digress from the topic, perhaps this should go into it's own one...

Hello Rich, nice hearing from your expertise again !

On one robot I'm using amultivoltage (5V USB at 2amp max, 9v / 12v) battery pack form Anker so it does the job perfectly and it's been working for days now so I think it's fine. On the other project I use a smart charger from Tenergy and the batteries are from ultrafire. Both batteries and charger have overcharge/overdischarge safeties. Actually they already got upset and turned off twice because the charger does not provide enough juice. Indeed this charger sends only 500ma constant charge current and I need at least 1.5 amps since I have an ethernet shield on arduino + netgear ethernet to wifi adapter running constantly in order to power up / donw / reset the Rovio when it's needed. Therefore I ordered another Tenergy model which sends 1.5 amps constant charging current instead. However I wonder if it will be enough since I fear that arduino+shield must take something like 500 mA and I know that the ethernet to wifi adapter takes 1 amp (the Rovio takes more but has a sleep mode and anyway I can remotely turn it on/off). I think it should be enough since the other Rovio (the first project) works fine with more equipment and a 1amp charger. It seems though that li-ion indeed don't like trickle charging (does trickle mean that you let the device plugged on the charger constantly, I'm not even sure actually. And if the charge happens while devices are running and constantly taking power out of the batteries, shouldn't it be fine then ?).

Best.

Trickle means that once charged it will still send a small current into the battery to maintain it's charge, it's not really needed on LiPo/Li-Ion since they don't lose charge very quickly when not in use. Such chargers should not be used on LiPo/Li-Ion batteries. At least that's what I've read.

Ah ok ! I had looked into Google translate so I was a little bit confused and I thought it meant exactly what I'm doing : leaving the batteries connected to the charger while they still send current to several devices.

Hello,

Has anyone eventually accessed his EZB through direct TCP connection ? Mine is still not responding after connection is set.

thanks Elfege

You may have better luck if you remove power from the EZ-B and then reconnect it. Sometimes something locks up the board and the connection cannot be made. You may also observe that the blue LED goes out when attempting a connection and to clear that condition requires the power to be removed and then connected again. You will finally get rewarded with a connection like this: