Browse over 10,000 Electronics Projects

Teardown of a Vivitar Rapid battery charger

Teardown of a Vivitar Rapid battery charger

Kerry Wong did a teardown of a Vivitar rapid battery charger for the NP-FW50 lithium-ion battery pack used in Sony A6000 digital camera:

The circuit board itself though looks surprisingly clean and well designed. It does not use any dedicated lithium ion battery charging ICs however. Rather a MC34063A buck/boost DC-DC converter chip is used to provide the current limited 8.4V constant voltage. This arrangement is less ideal then the typical lithium ion battery charging technique. Typically, the charging current is held constant until the voltage reaches a certain threshold and then the charger switches to constant voltage mode. Once the charging current drops under a predetermined threshold the charging is done. The charging current under constant voltage charging however, monotonically decreases from the get go so it usually takes much longer to obtain a full charge. But the good news here is that overcharging is unlikely as the charging voltage is fixed to the correct battery terminal voltage.



Advertisement1


More details at Kerry Wong’s blog.

Check out the video after the break.

 


Top