Thunder Power RC

The most recent addition to Thunder Powers expanding line of smart balancing chargers is a TP1430C. Now we have one on the bench and we have a couple of batteries and a couple of power supplies. We're going to go through the functionality and get you comfortable with the interface. But before we start playing around, I want to talk for a minute about Most of us have 12 volt power supplies if we're using somet 12 volts is pretty common. 12 to 15 volt, a lot of them are variable. You may be able to dial it up towards 15 volts. But working in that 12 to 15 volt range, you're going to be able to charge up to a 7s pack. Once you go beyond 7s, it's going to require So for example, an 8s or 9s pack is going to require up to 19 or going to require 19. 9 volts, 15 to 19. 9 volts. So you're going to have to be 15 or greater on 7s to 9s. And once you go beyond 9s packs into the 10s packs, w 9 or 20 volts and Now the example we're going to use is a 27 volt power supply. It actually puts out about 28 and dialed down to about 21 volts. That's going to allow us to charge our 10s pack. But a lot of people don't have those kind of power supplies around. And they get a little pricey. When you get into a 27 volt power supply, you can be $2, $250 pretty easy, especially if you're running around 40 amps, w So take that into consideration before you j An easy way to get around that is to take two automotive batteries and put them in series and now you've got 24 volts and you're fine. But if you're going to use an AC power supply, you may take a look at some of the specs before you make the plunge and realize it's now a $400 or $500 charging solution as opposed to just buying the charger. The other side is firmware updates. Make sure you do your firmware updates. The 1430 comes out of the box. It should come out of the box with the latest firmware version. Go out to the website and verify. When you first boot up the unit, you'll be able to see the firmware version. It's loaded down from the factory. But go out, make sure you pull down the utility and pull down the latest firmware update. You can go to ThunderpowerRC. com and go to the support facts section. You'll see a downloads link. Go there, find your charger, the 1430, download the CUI interface software and download also the latest firmware. That's going to allow you to load the CUI software interface, connect through mini USB port to the charger and then d Other than that, let's move on to the specs and get familiar with what the 1430 can do. The 1430 is a multi-chemistry balancing charger that will handle LIFE, LIPO, Lithi Now, it'll balance up to a 14S Lithi So it has a balancing card or the balancing jack. You'll see the plate that it has for all the different connections up to a 14S Lithi That's pretty monstrous when we look at doing our larger packs. Maxim That's what the charger is rated for. Now, what it comes down to is your current. We're all curious about what the current rates are. It's 0. 2 to 30 amps on the output side and 0. 01 amp increments, w You want to get right on the money as far as maxim It's nice to have that 0. 01 increment to be able to get tuned into exactly what your milliamp rating is. Now the input power, as we had mentioned, is 12 volts to 36 volts. So you've got a pretty wide range in that you actually require to use some of those T So we're going to charge one pack at a time. But the additional features on t It also has 12 user programmable memories. So you can set up 12 different charge configurations or parameters and that can be multichemistry, charge rates, whatever it may be, and then you just quickly refer to those when you go through and charge your packs. It also has live data monitoring with internal pack resistant measurements. We're going to show you that too so you can do a little bit of IR measurements w So let's go ahead and get started j Let's go ahead and get familiar with the layout of the 1430. The input is on the left-hand side. It can be a pretty good size leads, a 10 gauge wire with banana jacks on the end. Now they do include a couple of clamps, clips as well, so you can clamp onto a battery terminal and you can just plug the banana jack right into the end or banana plug right into the end of those jacks. On the left-hand side is where the power comes in and you also have the mini USB port as well so you can connect to the PC and update the firmware. On the front panel you have mode, enter, and then plus and minus w You also have your two output ports on the front, w You can use one of the included cables, they give you cable sets and just put our own Dean's Ultra Connector on there so we'll be using t On the right-hand side you have the balancing board connector. The balancing board itself is split into two halves. On the right-hand side you have the JSTXH connectors and on the left-hand side you have TPFP. Now these all perform the same function, they just use different physical formats that you'll find on common batteries out there. In fact we have a life battery here that uses a JSTXH and that's the w Depending on the manufacturer that you choose for your battery you'll use the appropriate connector. There is one more, the Hyperion style connector, w Not real common in the US, but it's a t But t We're using the TPFP connector course, they have the cell count, so 2-3S, and then you can go down through and find all of your different variations. 2-3S all the way up to 6-8S, and then 6S plus 6S, and 7S, 7S. So depending on the combination that you have on your particular battery, you just follow the guide and plug in the balancing leads accordingly. We're going to go ahead and use our Dean's connector today, We'll go ahead and power up. The first t We'll go ahead and plug it in, Included a multimeter so we can get an idea of what our output voltage is directly from the power supply. So we see we're running 14. 8V right now, we're going to go ahead and power up, I t We're going to go ahead and plug it in and go through some of the menuing. When I first boot t So when you power yours up, there you see V2. 4, we've got the 2. 4 version of firmware loaded on here, so always verify that you're running the right version on board after you do your update from the PC. I'm going to unplug these w Again, we have a mode button and enter button and a positive and negative or up and down. From the first boot up screen, you're going to see it's going to put you right into your memory one slot. We can go ahead and to really go through and store those, all you do is make modifications and move out of them. It automatically stores the settings inside of them. So by default, it starts you off on memory slot one. Now when you're looking at the first one we're looking at, we can also go into the setting data and the data view. Now the data view is when we have a battery connected and we want to look at the internal resistance. We want to look at each of the cell, individual cell voltages as they're connected to our balancer. And a lot of the other data on the live data, once the actual cell is hooked up, the settings view is going to be tied to whatever memory you're setting on inside the memory view. So if we go back here, we're setting on what's been configured as a lipo. If we wanted to change that up from here, we would actually We started off on lipo. We can go to a lithi I went too quick. It does time out, so you've got to go back in. There we go. And there's our lead acid, PB, or sealed lead acid, our nickel metal hydride, and also our nickel cadmi So when we go into that settings view, it's going to be relating or reflecting w So say for example, I stored memory setting one as a lipo and we let t We just go right back to memory setting two. And we change that to, I don't know, a life. I'll go back to memory setting three. We'll change that to a nickel metal hydride. And then we go back to our memory. And then we go down, you'll see it'll keep those settings. So memory one is a lipo, two is a life now, and three is a nickel metal hydride. If I go into the settings view on t Now additionally, when I'm setting wit So right now it'setting on charge. If If you want to do a charge to discharge cycle, and then back to store. Now store is when you want to reduce your battery pack down to storage voltage, which on a lithi 85 volts per cell roughly. So it does have an automatic storage setting on here, we're going to go back to our memory one settings. So let's go ahead and go into memory one. I've got to get a discharge here. There we go. Let me get back to charge. And then we're memory one. I'll go back to memory one. I'm in lipo. And then I'm going to go ahead and go to my settings view so we get familiar with the most common batteries you're going to be charging with the 1430 are most So we'll get into there and take a look at it. If we'll go ahead and move positive up through there. The first t 2 volts per cell. By default that is 4. 2. You can change it by 2 max. Input power, low voltage cutoff is 10 volts. You can adjust the low voltage cutoff inside the charger. Input current, a max of 40 amps. We can continue through here and we'll see cycle pause time if we're doing a charge-discharge cycle on a nickel metal hydride or nickel cadmi We can go through and adjust that time between charge-to-discharge or discharge-to-charge to give those cells a chance to settle out and rest and equalize before we go into the next process. Charge capacity limit, right now that default setup is 110% of the stated milliamp capacity of the battery you're charging. The most it'll allow it to charge is 110%. Now normally that doesn't mean it's going to charge up to 110% every time. That's just a safety cutoff to say that I'll only put in 110% of the stated capacity of the battery. Another safety feature is a safety timer, 250 minutes. So say you have t You can change that if you've got a specific application. You want to be able to take that down to a shorter period of time but the most you can push that up to is 250 minutes. We're also going to look at temperature cutoff. Internal temperature cutoff is 167 degrees by default. There is no external temperature probes on t Going forward, key beep on or off, we can stop the beep that we hear when I press t Key beep duration is your finished charge or complete charge indicator. Right now it's five seconds, a five second tone will go off and The last setting is temperature unit. You can change from fair height to Celsius and then we go back to setting data. Again, when we go to data view that's going to be based on a battery connected. So let's go ahead and go back to our main screen, our first memory slot and we'll connect the battery. The first one we're going to connect up is a 3 cell, 13, 1320 milliamp, 11. 1 volt battery. T We have a selection of batteries we can choose from but the first thing I You really don't have to because you're not going right into a charge process to connect it but I'm going to go ahead and go through my settings here and set t LiPo Charge, we're going to do a charge so we'll leave it in charge mode. Our cell count is only 3 cells so we're going to take that to 3S, 11. 1 volts. Our capacity is 1320 so we want to pull t What you'll notice too is it automatically pulls the charge rate down along with it. One of the safety features of the 1430 is it by default keeps you in that 1C charge rate so you're not charging it too Now naturally as you get into some of the newer cell chemistry and we have some here we can talk about, you're going to be able to charge at a much You can go through and manually override that. We have a 1320 milliamp, we've got 1320 milliamp on our capacity and our 1C default charge rate is 1. 32 amps so everyt You can additionally go into the balancer and turn that off in the event that you don't want to use the balancer if you're using a non-chemistry that doesn't use the balancer for example. I leave it on by default because I want it to balance my cells all the time. Now that I've got my setup inside the 1430 I'm going to go ahead and connect it. I always connect the balancer ports first and I'm going to go into t I'm going to plug in my main lead and go ahead and plug in my battery. The cool thing we can do now is since we've just connected our battery we can j What we'll see is we do have our internal resistance. We can do an internal resistance check right now, hold down the enter and it will do an internal resistance check, 70 milliamp overall for the pack. If we go plus through that it's going to give us the option to do a check on each of the cells. Now I see we've got 23 milliamp, roughly 22-23 milliamp, a resistance on cells 1, 2 and 3. As we continue through our data view it gives us the ability to go to our individual cell voltage. Now if we continue to the plus button you'll see it goes all the way up to our 14 cells. Since we only have a 3 cell here it's registering cell 1, 2 and 3. They're right on the money, 3. 98, 3. 97. T So we're good, our battery checks out okay, at least from t What we'll do is we'll go back on our mode button, we'll go back to our first memory, the LiPoCharge 3S, 1320 milliamp, 1. 32 amp charge rate and the balancer is on. All we do is I'll kick on the fan on our power supply since we will be charging and I'll go ahead and hold down the enter button and it'll start the charge. It's going to do a battery check and then it begins the charge process. Our main status screen is LiPoCharge. It's in the CC portion of the CCCV mode for termination methodology on lithi Constant current, constant voltage. So the first portion of the charge process goes into constant current which d 32 amps, our stated amperage. Once it gets up towards the top end of the cells and the charge voltage, the actual packed voltage begins to slow down. It's monitoring that process. It knows that the internal resistance is kicking up a little bit because you're at capacity. It'll switch over to CV mode w So it'll look at maintaining a constant voltage as it continually and slowly increases up to maxim That's a very crude way of explaining how CCCV is processed inside of a charger but what you're going to see is t So our total time, our whole process time is listed up here in the upper right corner. Were a minute and three seconds into it. So far we've d So there's our general status screen. You can Right now we've got 4. 06, 07 and 07 volts on our three different cells. We can go through and none of them are going to display since it's only a three cell. And then we go back to a LiPoCharge TEEP peak voltage, 67 degrees internal, 12. 1248 volts is our pack voltage peaked out right now. We can see that in the data view as well but we can see and verify off of our multimeter that's accurate and we go back to our standard charge status screen. So just move between w Now when you go back to your standard charge screen you can hold down the enter button and what that will do is take you, it will escape you out of the battery. So you can see that it's in the middle of the screen. Now somet What we can also do is we can start cranking that up or down accordingly. So you can make adjustments to the base charge rate right there w So we're going to be charging the battery and we do our We're going to kind of need to do that to override the standard So let's go ahead and end t So that's the basic function of a 7S or smaller pack on a 12 to 15 volt power supply. Now as we go through and we start looking at So let's go ahead and disconnect our battery and we'll move into a T Now t 2 amps on the input side. Now we know our charger is rated at 30 amps but depending on our power supply's voltage, it's going to determine what the maxim So we're going to find out with us running less than 36 volts. We can't quite jam 30 amps into t So the first t Now t It has a fan that runs constantly and understandably since it's putting on such So now we have our power supply powered up. We're going to go ahead and put in our multimeter again to verify our actual voltage we're getting out of it. And what you'll see is, as I pull this in, what you'll see is things are going to j We're running 28. 54 volts out of t As we plug in our 1430, same process, always plug in before you plug in your battery. And immediately it's going to recognize that incoming voltage being much So when we go through our menu and set up for our larger battery, it's going to give us some more options in terms of charge rate. So the first t Now t So I'm going to take group And put it in 1 through 6 on the 5S configuration. And then second group B is going to be on 6 through 11. So now we're hooked up to our balancing board. And we're going to go ahead and connect our main pack. Now you have an option here of either connecting from the Dean's connector, get a lot of arc, a lot of static, there's a lot of inrush current there. I kind of And then I notice there's a little less arcing coming off of my banana plug as opposed to my Dean's. So it's a little less violent of a connection. But it's either way it works fine. T I've noticed less arcing when I use the banana plug to plug in. So let's go back into our charger now that we're set up with a new setting and look at taking memory 1. It's going to be a LiPo charge, but we are now up in the 10S range. Now as I move over to my capacity, it's a 4,400 milliamps. So again, you're going to see t 4 once I get up to 4,400 milliamp. There we go. So we're 4. 4 amp. Now we can go ahead and override that right now. T So we're going to go ahead and pull our amperage up to what it will allow us. Now based on the 28. 54 volts coming in and 4,400 milliamp with 10S, the charger by default is going to cap us off probably right around 20 amps. There we go. 20 amps is our maxim Now once we actually commit to the charge, we can override that and take the amperage even We've got everyt We'ready to go. 28. 54 volts on the input side. Everyt We can always verify our battery, which is a great idea to do with any lithi Go into your data view, move up and verify that you've got voltage and the proper voltage on each one of those cells. So now we should go all the way up to our 10S. 1 through 4, 3. 93, 9, 2 looks good. 5 through 8, same t And 9 and 10. So we're running good voltages, similar voltage for 0. 1 volts or 0. 01 volts off in most cases, w So we verify that our battery's good. If we want to check internal cell resistance, we can do that here as well. Hold down our enter key and it will flash the battery. There we go. And we're getting So we get very low resistance off of that battery pack. And you notice it'll between a 4-year-old cell technology and a current cell technology. So we'll go back to our memory. 1 LiPoCharge 10S is set up for the 400 milliamp, 20 amp, BLC on, everyt Now I'm very briefly going to fire t I do not have this in a charging bag and I don't But since we're going to do t We're going to commit to the charge and then what I'm going to do is immediately go into the amperage field and crank it up to maxim And you can see that we'll be able to go up to, should be around 25 amps with our input power supply. So let's hold down to commit. It checks the battery and starts the charge process when we see our amperage climbing up. We're almost a peak in t We're at 39. 9. So when we get up to 20 amps, I'm going to go ahead and go in and take it up. 1, 22, 23, 24. And there we go. 25 amps is the most it'll let me do with the incoming voltage we have. So I'm committed at 25 amps, so my battery is charging at 20 amps. I'm at 40 volts. It's already going to start pulling it down because it's past the constant currents going to the constant voltage side. So it's going to start pulling down my amperage incrementally all the way down until my pack registers as full. During t I can also go through and look at my temperature peaks. And you notice I'm already up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 103 degrees Fahrenheit, so she'starting to get warm. Always verify the, and I just went ahead and killed that charge process. Always verify the temperature of the cables. When you do a high amperage charge rate My charger started getting warm. I felt my fans were putting out a little bit of heat in the back. My leads coming off my power supply were definitely increasing in temperature a little bit. But my Dean's connector was staying cool. My battery wires feel pretty good. They're nice and cool. A little bit warmer up here near the jack. That's normal. These particular wires are rated at 200 degrees Celsius. Now you never want to let them get that hot. But that's normal to expect a little bit of warmth to be generated when you're pus So that's really the only t Again, of course the series or the sequence is always disconnect your batteries and power down your charger. So we're going to pull our main lead pack or pack lead, pull our balancing leads, and then go ahead and power off our power supply once those caps bleed out. There we go. And we're disconnected. As I had mentioned, make sure when you're doing a charge, any charge, no matter how small or insignificant the battery seems, t Always charging a charging bag. In fact, Thunderpower has some very small compact charging bags now. Instead of the old, larger, rubbery bags, they have some small ones that are pretty convenient for most of their battery sizes. And it just makes that added level of safety. Don't charge unattended, but it does give you the confidence of being able to be in the same room, work on some other stuff, and you've got some level of security. I also use a fire safe security box when I'm doing large packs because a lot of times they don't fit very well. I'll use an old fire safe security box and I'll go ahead and pass the leads to the end of it to connect it and let it charge up that way as well. So just be mindful and safe. There's a lot of energy potential here. We can discharge at 396 amps alone on t So if you t So just be mindful. Be careful and be sensible when you're using Well, that wraps up our overview of the TP1430C from Thunderpower. If you'd com and click on the Knowledge Base link at the top. For mobile users, you can go to RCFlightSource. com and download our mobile app and take our workshop clinics on the go. If you have any specific questions regarding the TP1430C that haven't been answered in t com and look under the Support Facts section and see if the answer to your question resides. Otherwise, double check the manual. If you're still st