This Lithium battery charger circuit board, based around a TP4056 chip, will set you back all of $0.90. That may be an overestimate. I won an auction this week for 5 of them and paid $1.36, shipping included.
The board is designed to charge high-capacity cells at 1 A, which is exactly what I have been using it for. But it can easily be hacked to charge tiddly coin cells at much lower rates. The charge rate is set by a resistor, identifiable as R4 on the schematic.
Sure enough, R4 on the PCB can be identified as 1.2 KΩ by its marking (122). According to the TP4056 datasheet that value fixes the default charging rate at 1 A. That's way higher than the 45 mA maximum recommended for a rechargeable LiR2032 coin cell so I unsoldered R4 and replaced it with a 33 KΩ surface mount resistor. Other charging rates can be set with reference to the table on the datasheet.
All that remained was to wire up the output terminals to a coin cell holder ($0.10) with the aid of a scrap of stripboard and a male pin header. About the only thing you can do wrong is wire the terminals the back to front, which I duly did.
Now just plug in a mini USB cable and wait an hour or so. The green LED marked D2 will light up when the battery is fully charged.
One last thing. Do not attempt to recharge CR2016 and CR2032 cells. It is a generally good idea only to recharge rechargeable cells. Unless you are Afroman. Or you are trying to commit insurance fraud by setting your house on fire. Then it's OK.
Photos- $1 Coin Cell Charger by Hack A Day on 2014-01-17
Comments