Battery Charge Adaptors

[Guest]

[Ronc]

I had terrible experience with the $20 battery charger adapter...

Seems hard to believe it was the adapter that was the culprit. The Li-Po cell(s) are separated from the battery connector pins by a printed circuit board which controls the charging based on the cell voltage. The adapter just takes the place of the OQO to facilitate the connection of the OQO's power supply (whether the AC or DC version) to the battery's connecting pins. There are plenty of threads about battery issues; it could be a bad run of cells or a suboptimal battery control circuit board, both of which are built in to the battery.  Just because OQO sends a RMA replacement doesn't mean it's any better than the original part with respect to an unrepaired manufacturing defect.  However, in theory at least, a replacement done recently should be better than one done long ago.

[Picasso]

Its not that simple. The Adaptor is not just a pass through device. Some of the pins cross and have resistors on them.

[Ronc]

Its not that simple. The Adaptor is not just a pass through device. Some of the pins cross and have resistors on them.

That may be true, but my reasoning was that the internal circuit board should be monitoring the cell(s) voltage and limiting the current accordingly. The resistors may be there to mimic the effect of the OQO which the adapter replaces. It seems unlikely that the adapter's resistance would decrease so as to cause more current to flow. If it increased or burnt out it wouldn't charge the battery as fast (or at all) and therefore wouldn't damage the battery.

[Picasso]

Or maybe the resistor blocks the signal that tells the charger to shut off sending full power.....ever notice with the 01 psu that it has two noise factors to it. One when running and another when running and charging...

[Ronc]

Or maybe the resistor blocks the signal that tells the charger to shut off sending full power.....ever notice with the 01 psu that it has two noise factors to it. One when running and another when running and charging...

Never had an 01 so I'll have to defer to your experience. But in thinking about it it seems reasonable that the psu would be doing more work when both running the OQO and charging the battery since as Dennis has said in a related post, usage of the OQO while charging should have no effect on the charging rate of the battery.

Regarding the resistor, I would imagine the thing that stops the charging process is the circuit board within the battery.  In other words, there may be an internal circuit board problem that would fail to pass the appropriate signal to that part of the circuit board (within the battery) that tells it to stop charging.  In other words the psu+OQO (or the psu+adapter) is always making the same power available to the battery terminals but the limitation in charging of the cells is controlled within the battery by it's circuit board.

[Dave P]

I have to agree that the cutoff is most likely in the battery. I regularly leave my batteries plugged in overnight with no problems, both when attached to a shutdown/hibernated OQO and when attached via a battery adapter.