Battery Id in Saber Packs

[mdahmer]

When an Astro Saber III is set in the new Tri-Chem Hockey Puck charger, what does the Charger need to ID a specific Battery: LI, NiMh, Nicad? It is just a resistor read or does data have to pass between the battery and the charger? I am re-cutting dead tall saber packs for Lithium packs. One dissected Chinese Lithium battery (crappy quality) has the protection circuit with three leads to the battery: Plus, Minus and BC (battery control) There is a three IC circuit board for protection and over charging etc. The four wires from this internal pack controller, red, black, white, and black go to 4 button on the back Looking at the button side of the battery shows: Plus labeled P+ the controller (red on the left); black (2nd position from the left and labeled (HL on the battery's internal lithium controller circuit card); White labeled ID on the battery controller (3rd from the left); and ground labeled P- (4th position fro the left). Basically how does the charger "know" what battery is place?

[DavidJ]

Have you gotten any further with this inquiry? I have the same questions. I got some of the Chinese lithium Saber batteries ($48 with charger) and they seem to be okay but have not split one open yet. I think Mot implemented IMPRES to address this issue, putting some smarts in the battery and everything before that was up to the systems designer of that platform.

[Bigfella237]

Pretty much all Motorola accessories these days have at least one Dallas/Maxim One-Wire device in them, which can be responsible for storing all kinds of data as well as reading voltage and temperature in the case of batteries, so I'd guess that any non-OEM manufacturer trying to emulate Motorola's products would probably have them as well?

To find out for sure you'll need a One-Wire adapter like a DS9490 modded with a couple of wires attached, then run Maxim's One-Wire Viewer (there's an online version here: http://www.maximintegrated.com/en/produ ... -start.cfm ), use the ground terminal and probe the other terminal that doesn't have battery voltage to see if a new device pops up on the list?

IMPRES batteries have two chips in them: a DS1973 which contains a heap of data such as the model and serial number, chemistry, first used date, last charged date, etc. etc.; and a DS2438 which reads temperature and voltage (as well as humidity except that isn't used). I've found some non-IMPRES batteries have chips in them too (XTS4000 batteries have a DS1982 for example).

These One-Wire chips range from having a unique ROM serial number only (no RAM at all) up to having 32kb of RAM (in the case of the DS1977), others have all kinds of clocks, timers, SHA functions, password protection and the list goes on...

Odds are that if the battery does actually store data it will have (at least) one of these One-Wire chips inside.

Andrew

[DavidJ]

Right, but the OP and I were talking about Saber batteries with predate any kind of digital data interchange.

At least one aftermarket charger from the MT/MX era and even before would ramp the charge current and look at the voltage to determine what was up with the battery. I think the same is true of the pre-IMPRES Saber "smart charger."