Inside a Olight magnetic battery charger. 

i respect olight as a company, i have many of their flashlights and batteries and they work perfectly, i'm not surprised about the design and complication of things about this charger

With NiMH the low current you measured was part of the 1 minute precharge cycle to detect overdischarged 4.2V LiIon. Afterwards charge current rises to 500mAh

I purchased one after seeing your video many months ago. It’s very useful and can help resurrect a Li ion cell that is a bit over discharged.

Bought multimeter for myself with jack detection, so if leads are in amps socket, and you try to measure voltage, it beeps. Saved me a few times already from blowing fuse. Sometimes you just got distracted by something, and it's nice to have that functionality to remind you.

I can highly recommend this charger for travel. It needs lees space in your case and with a USB charger with power delivery (for notebooks) you only need one charger for everything. Bought a second OLIGHT charger for charging two batteries at a time. Only downside, because it is charged by USB an AA takes a few hours to charge but overnight no problem...

"Blow a fuse in the meter" If you're lucky! You might just burn out some knee-slappers in your circuit under test.

The "Knee slapping the current" made me laugh a lot more than it should have.

Today on "Things You Didn't Know Existed and Now Need"

you should really have amazon affiliates setup for stuff like this. just went and ordered one and it would help the channel i'm sure.

This looks like a very compact travel charger for batteries. If I had had it when playing on my GBA then I would have saved a fair amount of space needed to charge the batteries.

I did some research and found the Chinese product sheet on taobao. The part in the Chinese title after MOS FET is 直拍 or Zhi Pai, which translates to "Pen-hold grip" (a term from table tennis), and can also translate to something like "straight" or "direct". Judging by other products having "penhold" in the name on taobao, my guess would be that it's the Chinese word for "Surface mount". When translating Knee-slapper to Chinese, it shows as "Xigai". Maybe it's translated by someone who misheard it?

very nice presentation. Ive been using these universal chargers in my go kits for years now. They work well for the price and do multiple batteries of mine. Thanks for the video!

Olight makes a little flashlight called the S1R that pulls 2.8 amps from the battery! You should check it out, it has a pretty complex circuit for a flashlight, I'm sure. I'd love to see inside.

I have one of those chargers that has been rebranded as Foursevens ( flashlight company). It came with my flashlight I bought as well as the 550mAh RCR123A battery that is rated at 5c discharge. The charger works great for charging the battery and seems to take about 45mins to charge from "flat".

I bought 2 of these a few years ago cause they were inexpensive ($11 ea). It's a lil slow @ 500mAh with larger Li-Ion cells, but very convenient. I still have 1 unopened in the box.

The only one negative is that it is limited to 0,75A, i have this charger and use it with hand crank generator so it would be nice if it would be charging at least 1A. I use 18650 3500mah battery in my flashlight and it takes around 5-6 hours to charge it so it is a long time :) that is the only negative the rest is very good and helpful.

More knee-slapping vids please.

Chinese seems to be quite a poetic language, full of figures of speech. The pictograms in question are 直拍 (zhí pāi). Literally, this means "straight shot" which is the Chinese expression for surface mount. As someone else pointed out, 膝盖 (knee slapper) doesn't look similar at all but it is pronounced xī gài. The Chinese language is pronounced in two very different ways, Mandarin and Cantonese, and if I were to hazard a guess this could have been the inception of this error. Another reason that I've read is that there used to be a common and terrible software package in China that was used to translate from Chinese to English. Even with the best translation software, number in Chinese is inferred by context. It would be impractical to have a second pictogram for more than one of something. The most common translation error you will see are plural where the word should be singular and vice versa.

Knee Slappers... lol. Proper cheered me up before I go to another shite day at work. Great vid as always Clive and an interesting little charger.

Knee slapping the output to the battery actually made me cry, thanks dude, made my day.

It's definitely good to always mention resetting the leads after a current measurement. I've only forgotten once but once is enough - thankfully the device was being powered by a bench power supply with a low current limit so no harm was done except to my pride.

I know how you like your lights, Clive, and Olight makes a number of excellent torches including rechargeables that use a simpler version of the system in this video to charge the battery while it's still inside the light.

Absolutly aswome that you take such interesting Items apart!

But it's not pink. Is Clive alright?

Very cool! So, no matter which ends that you stick to the battery, it corrects the polarity if they are reversed? That's awesome. It's too bad it doesn't have a switch on the USB end for LiFePo4 cells, or I would have instantly bought one.. I imagine a switch could possibly easily be hacked in, but with today's digital electronics, it might or might not be that simple. Maybe I'll pull the trigger on one, and give it a shot at modifying it. If I do, and am successful at getting it to correctly work with the 3.2 volt cells, I'll report back with the results and how it was done. Unless Clive does it first.. 😜

Yey I suggested this! Glad you made the video Clive.

Clive, zooming is the best thing ever! Thanks for yet another great video.

We need to know more about Knee Slapping FET technology! I have a feeling it's going to be vital to research into quantum sexism. 🤔

new 2 your show, have been 2 your website and will patronize u when my card is fully charged thank u

They make nice flashlights too. I suspect they're run by a microcontroller and not an flashlight ASIC but I havent worked up the courage to potentially destroy one to find out what kind. I did send them an email and just got the standard "I do not have this information on hand now" response.

Big Clive. is it possible the 1mA parasitic drain you tested at the end could have been caused by the battery powering the part of the circuit that tries to work out the type of cell? It took a few seconds to detect the cell when it was plugged in I wonder if you did the parasitic drain test longer it would suddenly drop to an almost 0 value. a lot of my led flashlights (including an olight) which use electronic switching actually brag about the self discharging being in the several

The chip with no id on the top I would hazzard a guess is a timer esque device. Knee slappers are you polarity swappers and I would measure the wave form on the magnetic connections with a scope. I'd dare say with fets involved were looking at pulse width modulation to charge the cells.

I have one of these and use it all the time to charge my 123a's off a pc usb port. It's surprisingly quick and handy to charge them.

I like your sleep schedule, Big Crive

That's a neat piece of kit.

Quality video! I m enjoying this!!!

I have one of these & they are great.

Thanks Clive

Very interesting device 👍

I have found a couple potential candidates for the F42A that I can't at least rule out out of hand, and I thought I'd share them with you. Forgive me if I'm out of line. The NJU7704/05 is a voltage detector, and the version identified with F42A is an active low 4.2v detector. The next candidate is the "R1114x SERIES LOW NOISE 150mA LDO REGULATOR" which I found referenced as F42A in more than one database. These two are the only things I found with compatible packages that go by those numbers.

I have this on my Olight S2R torch, brilliantly bright torch

The Bob Ross of electronic circuits for me.

From my searching the F42A SMDs appear to be high-speed LDO regulators with on/off control.

I have a slew of Olight tactical lights. They're a great product.

I need one of those flat battery chargers. I been pulling them out of old phones and keeping the good ones. I'm using them to repair solar lights with bigger batteries. Turning things into solar lights. They're good free batteries.

That's a rather clever device! I am curious to know if it has backfeed protection. I suppose one of those diodes would do the job, though.

I do really like your meter that goes up to 20A

Well when you think of a bucking bull, it's knees might be slapping (given a poor translation) so my thought is that they're buck converters.

Hey, red filter on the Charger Doctor like I suggested :)

That's one neat charger indeed.

Thats very cool little compact charger. But I don't really need it, I have only one 18650 powered flashlight and I almost don't use that flashlight. Most of the time I use nitecore tube(keychain type) and nitecore nu20(powerfull small headlamp), both have built in battery and are charged from micro usb.

At uni we routinely use current probes for oscilloscopes and the ones we have (teledyne-lecroy) can be degaussed by selecting an option on the scope, I dont think the clamp is any different

the package is designed to prevent easy shoplifting (people would open the package and stuff the product in their pocket and leave the package behind) the lithium cell is a 2/3 a cell and probably is a primary cell witch probably has a diode built in to prevent charging. the data pins not being used are good because you dont have to worry about infecting your devices if the power bank or charger is a malware loader (there has been scares of rogue chargers infecting devices with malware (inside the charger is often a small micro processor designed to load some software code onto the device)). the data pins not being connected can be bad because it is unable to limit current (many devices use a resistor network across the data pins to power to tell the device if it is a genuine charger). you can also destroy the electronics you are working on if the device does not put enough current to blow the fuse in the meter

love the late night/early morning uploads

That's a neat little battery charger. I may find this one. I'm looking for a good 18650 battery charger. And I like that power bank you have. Ozark trail is walmart but I've never seen that power bank in my walmart.

You must degauss this ! I do it often because the unit is not accurate otherwise. Just use some old transformer coil with hole big enough to fit the unit trough it. I use AC230 to 24V transformer then the coil from some other transformer connected to 12V, does the job very nice.

Hi Clive great Laugh once again LORL i now have a vision of Clive wearing Pink Lederhosen doing The Big Clive Knee Slapping Dance to the tune of the Tetley Tea folk dance...great stuff.

i got this using just sometimes to charge a cell. looks good but ill watch the hole video and see how good it is.

Thanks for the info on the hall sensor - I wondered why American clamp meters only work on ac current and not dc. I have looked for a dc clamp meter here, but have not yet found one.

wow zoom and a cool product! winner winner chicken dinner....I can see where this could be very very useful. cool vid dude

Does anyone know who sells those little adaptable flat batter charger clips that +bigclivedotcom showed? I see them as a news item on Zedobank years ago, but can't see anyone selling now.

i don't know if you remember, but there was a big issue a while back with those rechargeable self-balancing transportations systems. I got myself a unicycle variant (from a fireman ironically) and while I was taking a look at the inside of it the other day it made me think, what is it inside these types of devices that actually makes them dangerous? as in what is it that's making them set on fire?

A nice little charger Clive. I'm wondering how they have achieved the electrical connection to the magnets. I've been trying to do this to connect my heated garments to the 12v on my motorbike with no luck. The trouble I have with standard connections of course is that I forget I am tied when getting off then things get embarrassing very quickly )

Would it degauss the thing to simply clamp it around a conductor with ac current flowing through? Not turning the meter on of course.

im wondering if this would be good to fully drain AA or AAA batteries that have not enough juice left to power anything, and use it to charge up a powerbank.

I don't really know much about electrical engineering. I like watching these kind of videos because it brings out the inner tinkerer in me. This is probably a dumb question but i was wondering what would happen if you put 2 batteries together end to end in series and tried to charge them both?

Can you post a link for the phone charger

wanted to buy one... nah I don't need it... sees Clive review.. now I want it

Good stuff!!

lol, used this and fried the mosfets on mine. still one of my favorite chargers.

What is the name of that universal flat-battery charger. I genuinely need one of those ;)

I like the magnetic charger that comes with devices from fun factory.

Anybody got any idea of where to get one of the small orange USB chargers shown at 8:50 onwards? I haven't been able to think of a search term that shows anything else than power banks.

Sorry if this was asked/answered already, but I saw this question on Amazon and thought it interesting. For the NiMH type batteries, once charged, does it continue with a 0.1C trickle/top-off charge after reaching capacity?

knee slappers. did anyone know what this means? I kinda know but would want to clarify with someone. I was told it was a relay where it would cut off if a opposite pole connected to ground, basically a switching system to bridge the opposite powering charge poles.

Paraphrasing Jasper Carrott - "If you can't improve the product, make the packaging impossible to get in to". SO TRUE!

I was very confused as to what this is, then suddenly I was amazed. Now I want to know if you can connect high voltage up and use it as a shock device...

Is it just for single cells? Can you put a couple of cells into a series battery holder and charge from there? What about a 9v rechargeable? Be a bit hard to put those ends on the battery, but if you could, will it charge it?

So how often do you have to scrap entire breakdowns due to not paying attention to camera angles or zooms? Seems like it would be easy to do since you have to be focusing on what you want to say and making sure the camera is looking at what you want it to at the same time.

Fantastic charger for charging individual under voltage cells.... in a Laptop or power tool battery...

good time of the day, if you have information, please tell me the markings of the analogs of the F42A component. Thanks a lot

have you checked out the folomov a1? I'd love to see what makes that one tick.

that tip about multimeter's is about 5+ months too late. I forget what I was doing now ( I was testing if something was repaired ?) but I managed to cause all lights in the room to go out briefly except my laptop and networking gear and then i heard my UPS kick in and then the power strip tripped and the lights came back on. unfortunately it was 2hrs before realizing what I did wrong! thankfully I had multiple safety failure mechanisms in place as I have a federal "fire" Pacific electrical panel ( waiting retirement ). there is a good reason that they put circuit breakers in power strips even if they don't have any surge protection functions.

When I got my olight s2r baton 2, I was just in the habit of throwing its magnetic charging cable in with my cellphone cable and others, which sit right next to my phone. It had slipped my mind about magnets being close to media devices. I was reminded of it when it attached itself to my phone. I flipped out and was worried it had wiped my cellphone, but everything was good. It now gets it's own spot to sit, about 5 feet away from everything lol

Very nice product. Can you test how well it charges a 18650 battery? Thanks Clive!

May have bought one of these just because of this video

I looked at the description for a link to the product.. in vain. I need this... and hasn't been able to find anything like it until now :)

I had thought about getting one of these as a backup charger. Do you recommend them?

How often do you want to only charge one NiMh cell?

Can it boost as well, and charge NiMH/NiCD packs?

Is it a buck-boost power supply so one can charge chains of multiple batteries at once? That might explain the circuit complexity.

Where can I get the gear you use? Those USB load things and that battery could come in handy for my projects

mean while I dont have any modular power supply abd I one tryed charging 3 18650 with 12v connected together I need this....

If you haven't already, check out their flashlights. They are some of the best for the money

a very clever product. BigClive, is there any electrics in that mid section with the blue covering ?

It doesn't need to detect the battery type because it doesn't care. It's just a DC-DC boost circuit and converts whatever it gets to 5v.

The FET knee slappers appear to be FET MOS transistors Possibly dual or tri maybe even quad.

Would love to get one of the phone battery chargers shown (yellow plastic thingy about 9 minutes in) Never seen one of them before - anyone know what they are called?

How much does a NIMH or NICD charge up to when it finishes? About 1.45 fresh off? or more lik 1.38 - 1.40?

What happens if you connect it to two NiMH batteries which are connected in series using a neodymium magnet?