>
> It's funny, I watched with much interest as you posted your results
> of extensive NiMH testing. My own results tracked with yours almost
> exactly. I looked at Panasonic and Sanyo cells as well as several
> other non-name brands and even good old Radio Shack cells.
> Interestingly, I found the Radio Shack NiMH cells to be about the
> worst of the bunch. Somehow, I wasn't too surprised...


:)  My employers at the time were not so convinced of my sanity..
"But the vendor says they are fine"...  Grrr.
I think that especially with batteries, the best you can hope for is that
you get what you pay for.




>  It's PIC based, charges 1-4 cells and uses individual
> charging and monitoring circuits for each cell.


We couldn't do per-cell charging, we were using 6 cell packs.



> It uses negative delta V and timer based cutoff and has a fast/slow charge
> setting.


Mine was AVR based of course, -dV, timer, max voltage, +dT terminations,
several different charge phases to handle deeply discharged cells, cold
cells, highly charged cells etc.
Basically each charge "phase" switched to the next phase dependent on how it
terminated.
Thermistor in the pack of course.

Ran into interesting problems trying to charge NIMH cells in vehicular apps,
where the ambient temperature can be past the "don't charge" limits.  Not
charging in these conditions wasn't acceptable since the competition charged
their cells in the same situations.  :-P
They never mentioned to the customer that this was damaging the cells
though.


> So
> far it's worked well with all the cells I've tossed at it (none
> killed, most fully charged). Consistent with your findings, it works
> best with better quality cells.


Yup.
The thermal plume was the best indicator of cell quality I could find, and
of course you'd have to run a full cycle on each cell to pick that up.
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