Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Charging timer for R/C batteries

arduino_controlled_socket
Santa brought [Quinten's] son a shiny R/C truck for Christmas, but this new toy had one drawback – its batteries could only be connected to the charger for a maximum of 6 hours, lest he turn his house into a pile of smoldering ash.  With grave warnings from the manufacturer dancing in his head, he searched around for a timer that would allow him to cut power to the battery after charging for its allotted time.  Coming up empty, he decided to create his own timed electric socket regulated by an Arduino he had sitting around.  He grabbed a project box and wired up a nice looking socket timer, complete with an LCD status display.  To make things easy for his son, he added two buttons to the front of the controller – one for selecting the amount of charging time, and one to set the timer in motion.  As with his previous hacks, [Quinten] has provided plenty of documentation in the form of pictures, code, and even a video of the timer in action.

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