TP4056

18 Articles

Is It Time To Retire The TP4056?

August 8, 2025 by 28 Comments

The TP4056 is the default charge-controller chip for any maker or hacker working with lithium batteries. And why not? You can get perfectly-functional knockoffs on handy breakout boards from the usual online sources for pennies. Betteridge’s Law aside, [Lefty Maker] thinks that it may well be time to move on from the TP4056 and spends his latest video telling us why, along with promoting an alternative.

His part of choice is another TI chip, the BQ25185. [Lefty] put together his own charge controller board to show off the capabilities of this chip — including variable under- and over-charge protection voltages. Much of his beef with the TP4056 has less to do with that chip than with the cheap charge modules it comes on: when he crows about the lack of mounting holes and proper USB-PD on the knock-off modules, it occurs to us he could have had those features on his board even if he’d used a TP4056.

On the other hand, the flexibility offered by the BQ25185 is great to future-proof projects in case the dominant battery chemistry changes, or you just change your mind about what sort of battery you want to use. Sure, you’d need to swap a few resistors to set new trigger voltages and charging current, but that beats starting from scratch.

[Lefty Maker] also points out some of the advantages to making your own boards rather than relying on cheap modules. Namely, you can make them however you want. From a longer USB port to indicator LEDs and a built-in battery compartment, this charging board is exactly what [Lefty Maker] wants. Given how cheap custom PCBs are these days, it’s not hard to justify rolling your own.

The same cannot be said of genuine TI silicon, however. While the BQ25185 has a few good features that [Lefty Maker] points out in the video, we’re not sure the added price is worth it. Sure, it’s only a couple bucks, but that’s more than a 300% increase!

We’ve seen other projects pushing alternative charge controllers, but for now the TP4056 reigns as the easy option.

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Playing Around With The MH-CD42 Charger Board

December 27, 2024 by 12 Comments

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.

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Lithium-Ion Batteries Power Your Devboards Easily

March 14, 2024 by 25 Comments

Last summer, I was hanging out with a friend from Netherlands for a week, and in the middle of that week, we decided to go on a 20 km bike trip to a nearby beach. Problem? We wanted to chat throughout the trip, but the wind noise was loud, and screaming at each other while cycling wouldn’t have been fun. I had some walkie-talkie software in mind, but only a single battery-powered Pi in my possession. So, I went into my workshop room, and half an hour later, walked out with a Pi Zero wrapped in a few cables.

I wish I could tell you that it worked out wonders. The Zero didn’t have enough CPU power, I only had single-core ones spare, and the software I had in mind would start to badly stutter every time we tried to run it in bidirectional mode. But the battery power solution was fantastic. If you need your hack to go mobile, read on.

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This Open Hardware Li-Ion Charger Skips The TP4056

March 11, 2023 by 21 Comments

There’s a good chance that if you build something which includes the ability to top up a lithium-ion battery, it’s going to involve the incredibly common TP4056 charger IC. Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It’s a decent enough chip, and there are countless pre-made modules out there that make it extremely easy to implement. But if the chip shortage has taught us anything, it’s that alternatives are always good.

So we’d suggest bookmarking this opensource hardware Li-Ion battery charger design from [Shahar Sery]. The circuit uses the BQ24060 from Texas Instruments, which other than the support for LiFePO4 batteries, doesn’t seem to offer anything too new or exciting compared to the standard TP4056. But that’s not the point — this design is simply offered as a potential alternative to the TP4056, not necessarily an upgrade.

[Shahar] has implemented the design as a 33 mm X 10 mm two-layer PCB, with everything but the input and output connectors mounted to the topside. That would make this board ideal for attaching to your latest project with a dab of hot glue or double-sided tape, as there are no components on the bottom to get pulled off when you inevitably have to do some rework.

The board takes 5 VDC as the input, and charges a single 3.7 V cell (such as an 18650) at up to 1 Amp. Or at least, it can if you add a heatsink or fan — otherwise, the notes seem to indicate that ~0.7 A is about as high as you can go before tripping the thermal protection mode.

Like the boilerplate TP4056 we covered recently, this might seem like little more than a physical manifestation of the typical application circuit from the chip’s datasheet. But we still think there’s value in showing how the information from the datasheet translates into the real-world, especially when it’s released under an open license like this.

Copy And Paste Lithium Battery Protection

February 2, 2023 by 40 Comments

Lithium batteries have, nearly single-handedly, ushered in the era of the electric car, as well as battery energy storage of grid power and plenty of other technological advances not possible with older battery chemistries. There’s just one major downside: these lithium cells can be extremely finicky. If you’re adding one to your own project you’ll have to be extremely careful to treat them exactly how they are designed to be treated using something like this boilerplate battery protection circuit created by [DIY GUY Chris].

The circuit is based around the TP4056 integrated circuit, which handles the charging of a single lithium cell — in this design using supplied power from a USB port. The circuit is able to charge a cell based on the cell’s current charge state, temperature, and a model of the cell. It’s also paired with a DW01A chip which protects the cell from various undesirable conditions such as over-current, overcharge, and over-voltage.

The best thing about this design isn’t the design itself, but that [DIY GUY Chris] built the circuit schematic specifically to be easily copied into PCB designs for other projects, which means that lithium batteries can more easily be integrated directly into his other builds. Be sure to check out our primer on how to deal with lithium batteries before trying one of your own designs, though.

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A collage of three images. On top is the main PCB of the headphones, with a charger IC and the main MCU. On the bottom left, it shows ACOK and EN signals going to pullup resistors near the MCU. On bottom right, it shows the charger chip with its pinout overlaying it, highlighting the pads to be probed and later cut.

One Hacker’s Battle To Slightly Improve A Sadistic Sony Headset

December 27, 2022 by 48 Comments

One thing you won’t read in reviews of pricey Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones – if you choose them, you’re going to find yourself in a one-sided abusive relationship. A button press or low-battery notification makes the headphones scream at you, ignoring the actual sound volume of what you’re currently listening to. Once they’re discharged, they suddenly emit loud noises, lecture you about how the battery is low, then shut down. Oh, and you can’t use them as they’re charging – if your voicecall lasts longer than expected, you might find yourself being shouted at and forced to fumble around with wires, silently pleading for call participants to wait while you change over to a different headset.

On-PCB footprint for the IC, with two pads carefully cut in half as mentioned in the article[MisterHW] decided to dig in and figure out how to work around at least some of the shortcomings. Naturally, the “no charge while using” limit looked like low-hanging fruit, and a hefty usability improvement too – plus, he suspected the charge cutoff to be masking noise issues already abundant on these headphones. Some painful disassembly later, he was inspecting the charger IC , the MP2625, responsible for power management. Its signals were connected to the MCU using via-in-pad – and some pads had to be cut in half to disconnect the vias.

However, the laborious pad cutting and subsequent careful soldering didn’t turn out to be fruitful. Even with external control of the output inhibition pins, the shutoff still continued – something affected the circuit, whether it was VBUS detection, some other unnoticed via-connected pins on the charger, or sensing on D+/D-. About to run out of life force for this mod, [MisterHW] added a Qi charging circuit, powering a TP4056 wired in parallel with the MP2625. The mod, dubbed HW-1000XM3, made these headphones all that more reliable and less annoying – charger and MCU none the wiser.

Now, all that’s needed to charge these headphones is to slap a magnetic charger coil onto them, and it doesn’t interfere with voicecalls as much as the screaming and forced shutoffs do. Hopefully, Sony eventually learns to test their headphones by having humans use them – it’s far from the only gripes with this lineup, after all. We also hope that the voice notifications will be conquered eventually – this summer, we’ve seen a hacker firmware mod a Bluetooth speaker to make the sounds more pleasant. If your headphones are based on a relatively popular module, repurposing them might be even easier than that!

DIY Fume Extractor With ATtiny13 Speed Control

September 4, 2022 by 15 Comments

Let’s be honest, commercially-available soldering fume extractors are cheap enough that you probably don’t need to build one yourself. But it still makes for a good starter project, especially if you go out of your way to really flex your maker muscles like [Arnov Sharma] did with this tidy build.

All the hallmarks of modern hardware making are on display here — you’ve got the 3D printed enclosure, a motor salvaged from a cheap toy quadcopter, and a custom PCB which uses the ATtiny13 and an AO4406 MOSFET to implement a PWM speed control.

The first press of the button starts the motor off at max speed, but keep pushing it, and the motor’s speed will ramp down until it turns off entirely. There’s even a TP4056 charge controller to top off the internal 18650 cell when the fume extractor is connected to a USB power source.

Is it over-engineered? Perhaps. But projects like these are a great opportunity to practice your skills, whether it’s PCB design or creating bespoke 3D printed enclosures. In the era of cheap 32-bit microcontrollers, it’s also refreshing to see hackers still dragging the ATtiny from time to time.

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