Originally Posted by splat

OK ,

Now Battery Charging. I have been charging my Ni-cad cells for years using a Basic Trickle charger. A couple of years ago I moved up to a "RC Car" Quick Battery charger.

well My Ni-cad (6 Packs ) Cells are 15 + years Old I started with 40 I'm down to 15.

so I have come up with this great Idea of Making a Peak Charger.

What I have done So far:
I had an Old 386 mother board in the basement , I attached a Power supply ,FLoppy drive, Video , HArd drive and a MetraByte DAS-4 A/D Board .
I installed DOS 6.22 on it . Installed the DAS4 software, now it can act as an 8 Channel +/-5 Volt Voltmeter , the demo software hasa stripchart recorded.
next I added a Big power supply , Using a Voltage divider I attached it to a Volatge Channel , Next I put a 2 ohn 20 watt Resistor in series and attached it to the AD and and finshed the circuit with the Battery. now I can Watch the Voltage ( and Amperage) as the Battery charges. The AD card also has some IO ports I plan to hook a relay up to them to turn power on and off.

Right now it is all Manual , next I need to programm the compouter to turn the power on and aoff , monitor the time and Current going into the batter y ( so I can Determine how much charge each cell contains after charing. and when The battery Pack has reached Peak Charge.

Long term I plan to take some of my Older Battery packs that have one or 2 dead chells take them apart and charge Battery cells indivually to Make Pcks of Matched cells.

Thoughts ?