Thanks for the discussion! I appreciate it!

The application I'm looking at would require that the charging supply is
simply charging the battery as best it can do, whilst the batteries are
under load by PWM DC Motors every now and again. So the batteries are
essentially acting as a buffer/capacitor to supply the short bursts of power
to the motors. While the motors are off the charger would be building up the
charge again...

This site shows roughly the circuit I would be thinking of using:
http://myra-simon.com/bike/charger.html

Does that sound like it should work? (I need a sanity check, I've been doing
software too long)

Cheers

Josh

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Harold Hallikainen
<harold@hallikainen.org>wrote:

>
> > Alrighty, well this L200 should supply a set voltage and a set current,
> so
> > this should be fine... any extra current drawn by the load would
> > presumably
> > be pulled from the batteries right?
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Josh
>
> If the power supply is truly constant voltage, then any increase in load
> will not affect the voltage, so the battery never sees a voltage change.
> As far as it knows, it's still float charging. So, the charging current
> and load current are both supplied by the charger, unless the charger goes
> away (AC mains drop). This soft of float charging is fairly common for
> standby battery use. It does not charge as quickly as voltage limited
> constant current, but it's very simple.
>
> Harold
>
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