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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Technical writing with a sense of humor is great. Highly recommended: the user manual of the SkyRC MC3000 Li-Ion charger.

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Link to PDFs [1] (scroll down, EN and DE it seems). Seems like an amazing device, too. Too bad it could only charge one at a time, so I guess you'd buy multiple of these on a tech dept.

[1] https://www.skyrc.com/MC3000_Charger

> Too bad it could only charge one at a time, so I guess you'd buy multiple of these on a tech dept.

The phone app screenshots show three charge one discharge cycle at the same time. It's a 4 channel charger which can work even with a single battery.

Currently I use IKEA's battery chargers*, but if I gonna need something more advanced, gonna look at this one.

*: IKEA's battery chargers are no slouches either. They're very intelligent with battery fault detection and very good charging characteristics.

Highly recommended, I have a whole slew of consumer and pro-sumer Li-Ion chargers and this one is by far the best, it's not the cheapest but it works very well.

What do you mean with one at a time? I've been using one of these chargers for a couple for years now and can charge multiple batteries at the same time. Even different types are not a problem. (nimh / liion)

What I mean is the very same type is going to work only once since you cannot convert it to twice the type you need. So in a work environment where you use these, you might end up with say two of these to load two of such rechargeable batteries at the same time. Whereas 'normal' chargers for things like AA and AAA have multiple spots for the same battery. Like the other comment, I also currently use IKEA's charger (my wife bought it), and it can charge a lot of batteries at the same time.

It charges up to 4 batteries at the same time (or discharges, or prepares them for long term storage etc).

I'm sorry I don't really get what you're saying. You can charge any (supported) battery type in any of those slots regardless of how many you want to charge at the same time. I can charge 4 eneloops simultaneously or 18650 or whatever...

Thanks, also jacquesm, I get/see it now. Its springs which adapt to the battery size. Neat!

Yes, most of these have that feature, what's unique about the MC3000 is that it allows you to create your own charge profiles ('programs') which you can then use to perform various operations on single batteries of batches of them. For instance, you can move batteries to a target voltage, which is wise to do before welding a pack with parallel cells (unless you like sparks, and if the difference is large enough, burning up interconnects).

I still remember the fun I had 30 years ago reading the t.c. electronics 2290 digital delay user manual.

Haha yeah the good old MC3000. I love this charger, it makes a simple task a little more exciting and sometimes (a bit) unnecessarily complicated - but at the least you've got full control about charging those damn batteries!

That's a fine charger too. Good hardware, good features, humorous user manual. A splendid combination, indeed.

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