Circuit Lake

Electronic Project and Circuit Collection

Lead-Acid Battery Tester, Desulfator & Charger

04/01/2013 Category: AVR, Power Supply, Tools

Da Pimp is ATmega48-based portable Lead-acid battery tester, desulfator & charger designed by Mikey Sklar. It uses capacitors instead of a transformer for efficient conversion of AC to DC voltages. With input 120VAC, it will deliver 0.5A constant current output and dynamic voltage 1VDC – 100VDC. While 220VAC input will increase its current output to 1A with dynamic voltage 1VDC – 100VDC.

This open source project is ideal for application such as rapid testing of batteries to determine how sulfated they are, recovering lead-acid car starting batteries, recovering entire sets of lead-acid deep-cycle battery banks (golf carts, forklifts), recovering power tool batteries (drills, weed wackers, saws), and recovering marine boat batteries.

Batery tester and charger

To test battery, simply connect Da Pimp to battery and turn on the black switch. If voltage rapidly jump after switch on then you have a bad battery. A good battery will have a slow voltage climb maybe just a few 1/10ths of a volt when the charger is enabled. The voltage difference before and after the charge is started indicates how much resistance has built up inside the battery (sulfation).

Besides Lead-acid battery, Da pimp can be used to charge lithium batteries. But, you should never charge exceed 10% over nominal with Li packs. Unfortunately, the project doesn’t have automatically stopped charging. You need to stop the charge at 120% the nominal voltage manually.