Alright, after being in stasis for a while, I will revive this project now.
I think we will need the following expertise, and of course the people that have it
- Someone who is experienced at designing a PCB - I am not.
- Some who can program the microcontroller - I think I can take care of that.
- The schematic itself would surely be a collaboration of this entire forum.
But on top of it all, we will need to establish the very basics of the operation of the charger. I'll just propose the following:
The charger can charge four NiCd/NiMH batteries (can be mixed), each channel will be monitored independantly. There could be four different modes, again, individually selectable: Normal charge (say, 14 hrs), fast charge (say, 4 hrs), save discharge (and do nothing afterwards), and save discharge and charge afterwards (either fast or normal, wait for 10 minutes or so after discharging to let the battery cool down.) Surely, after charging to 100%C, the charger would perform trickle charge (say at 4%C, or user selectable)
For simpleness' sake I think we should let the user control the charger with three buttons or so and a 2x16 line LCD. Default language for the controlls would surely be english, but it would be cool if we could also make other languages available. I could provide german
If I really put my mind to it, I think I could do this project myself. But I do not want that. I want this all to be a collaboration of us all. Post your ideas now, don't think too much about it, just post it. Just about anything could be useful.