If you’ve ever worked with adding lithium-ion batteries to one of your projects, you’ve likely spent some quality time with a TP4056. Whether you implemented the circuit yourself, or took the easy way out and picked up one of the dirt cheap modules available online, the battery management IC is simple to work with and gets the job done.
But there’s always room for improvement. In a recent video, [Det] and [Rich] from Learn Electronics Repair go over using a more modern battery management board that’s sold online as the MH-CD42. This board, which is generally based on a clone of the IP5306, seems intended for USB battery banks — but as it so happens, plenty of projects that makers and hardware hackers work on have very similar requirements.
So not only will the MH-CD42 charge your lithium-ion cells when given a nominal USB input voltage (4.5 – 5 VDC), it will also provide essential protections for the battery. That means looking out for short circuits, over-charge, and over-discharge conditions. It can charge at up to 2 A (up from 1 A on the TP4056), and includes a handy LED “battery gauge” on the board. But perhaps best of all for our purposes, it includes the necessary circuitry to boost the output from the battery up to 5 V.
If there’s a downside to this board, it’s that it has an automatic cut-off for when it thinks you’ve finished using it; a feature inherited from its USB battery bank origins. In practice, that means this board might not be the right choice for projects that aren’t drawing more than a hundred milliamps or so.
The same thing for 3.3V output would be nice.
If it has discharge protection then why a timer. I see so many charger devices that won’t run a LED bike light for that reason. I found one that doesn’t at Aldi with a work light, and there is space inside for a second cell. I only need to charge it once a month.
What would be amazing is 4.1v charging, for people who don’t want to kill thair battery charging it to 4.22 volts all the time.
Also regarding that down side, any chance of pulsing it with just enough draw periodically to keep the circuit alivem
There’s a version, the IP5306_I2C, which is programmable via I2C and can support 4.14V charge cut off so that might be useful but I’m curious if the ‘standard’ IP5306 variants are just factory programmed and if they’re modifiable.
It also seems from the various translated datasheets that you can modify other parameters including the auto shut-off time and boost output voltages.
What’s also interesting is that it supports 4.35V charging which means the stack of Lithium Cobalt cells I have could be fully charged and used at full capacity way more easily and cheaply.
Curious enough that there’s a pack of 5 boards soon to be on their way from China
Possible datasheet and more info: https://techobsessed.net/tag/mh-cd42/
There’s a full datasheet and I2C register address which Google translate does a good job of and there’s even an Arduino library to control it.
For MH-CD42? Could you please link them as I’m unable to find any? Thanks!
” this board might not be the right choice for projects that aren’t drawing more than a hundred milliamps or so”
Data sheet sez “Load removal detect timer – Load current continuously lower than 45mA – 32sec”
Hmmmm. I wonder how much load is required before it starts delivering power.
I’d love to see more investigation into and design work on these sorts of things. I’d love to see the FOSS community get some really tight lego-like modularity for circuits.
Like ideally we could get little boards that could be soldered on or added to designs that would just completely handle common aspects. USB PD, charging cells in circuit with all the bells and whistles (like being able to run off USB entirely while the battery charges), little easy to configure voltage modules, audio DACs, etc.
Ideally we could get to the point where someone could put down the unique components for their build and then use trusted community designs for filling in all the grunt work so you can spin up a full project super quick and easy.
I’ve been using the TP5400 (and TP5410) for years, which does all the lithium charging and battery management functions, as well as boosting the battery voltage to 5 volts. It supports 2 LEDs for charging status, which I prefer over the IP5306 which needs 4 LEDs to display charging status.