Electro Labs has a new project posted, this time it’s an Arduino Lithium Battery Charger. With Lithium batteries you can’t just stick a trickle charge on the battery and call it done with a lot of older battery chemistries. There is quite a lot of technology packed into the design to get the job done and lots of room for user customization.
“The lithium battery charger circuit is designed as an Arduino Shield. So the main controller of the board is Arduino. But the battery charger IC on the board,LT1510, can also work alone. R3 and R4 sets the charge cut-off voltage, R2 ,R24 and C5 adjusts the charge current limit. With those passive component configurations, LT1510 can charge the battery and know when to stop. But we want to build a user programmable charger. So we had to take control of these functions.”