SteveShannon

It would probably be too difficult to send them all in and ask for updated batteries. You should label or otherwise permanently mark the good new battery. Am I correct in believing that the bad batteries work in every way except negotiating ultra-high voltages once they hit fully charged?

Your username is mdyoungblood if that helps.

You don’t owe me any thanks. I literally did nothing other than reporting problems to the owner. Rich @rdunajewski is the owner and administrator. My guess is that he did something.

If all it’s doing is asking you to select a new password, I think that’s happening to all users. If the webpage is jumbled, try doing a refresh. If it’s still jumbled, report it.

I found this snippet in a bunch of articles on hackaday: MURDEROUS “USB-C” PSUS AT YOUR LOCAL LIDL Remember the power article, specifically, how you get to higher voltages? Let’s recap: you get 5 V first, and then only after resistor detection. Higher voltages require negotiations over a digital protocol. This is a safety rule – it’s how you can use the same USB-C charger for your laptop, your phone, your wireless headphones, your devboards and whatever else. Now, what happens when someone builds a power supply with a fixed higher-than-5 V output, say, 12 V, and puts a USB-C plug on it? The answer is – seriously bad things happen. Such a power supply isn’t safe to be used on actual USB-C devices – it’s likely to destroy your phone or laptop, and it’s at a glance indistinguishable from an adapter that follows the USB-C rules laid out for everyone else. If you must use such an adapter for something every now and then, you ought to mark its cable with red tape in a way that covers the connector plug, so that you (or your loved one) don’t grab it to charge something else. Seriously, it’s easy to make a mistake, and the more you get comfortable with USB-C, the more likely you are to make it. Who does this? Well, many no-name manufacturers do, but also Lidl Parkside tools, for one. CrowPi does this too, in their recently released CrowPi L laptop. Both of these come with dumb “USB-C” 12 V power supplies, and neither of them should be sold to consumers, especially given that the CrowPi laptop is designed for kids and educational purposes, and Parkside tools are designed for non-tech-savvy people. When your kid burns a $500 smartphone or your granddad burns his laptop due to a $2 power supply, that’s when the gravity of this standard violation really sets in.

My Alinco dedicated charger tops out at 8.41 vDC once the light turns green. That’s typically considered the max charge voltage for a lithium battery (actually 4.2 vDC per cell and the 7.4 vDC battery is made up of two cells). I wonder if the issue is that it’s a usb-c charging device rather than a dedicated charger. That would rely on the internal battery circuitry to regulate the voltage because the usb-c charger has no idea how many cells are in the battery.

Yes, we’ve been talking about it for a couple days in the section of the forum dedicated to this site.

That’s just about ideal. So the charger is definitely putting out 12 volts once the battery is fully charged. That seems completely wrong to me. For the example I listed earlier, the Baofeng charger displayed a green light and was putting out 8.08 vDC. The Alinco charger is still charging and it shows 8.34. When it turns green I’ll measure it again.

That could be. When transmitting the battery will provide the necessary power but I would expect a slight voltage drop which might cause issues for the charger.

Which is why I suspect a firmware issue with the charger increasing. Once the light turns green the charger should only provide the voltage necessary to maintain the battery. It shouldn’t increase the voltage that high. What does the fully charged battery voltage show when it’s out of the charger?

That’s what I’m saying; I don’t think it’s the battery. I think your charger is pushing too high of voltage. Take the battery off the charger and then measure the voltage at the battery terminals.

My Alinco charger with battery shows 7.93 vDC. My Baofeng shows 8.08 vDC. None of my battery chargers put out anything close to 12-15 vDC to a 7.4 volt lithium battery.

It appears that your battery is in the charger while you’re measuring the voltage at the terminals that connect to the radio. I could see a firmware error (maybe even intentional but not what I would expect) in the charger increasing the charging voltage to the wrong voltage. If so, that should be a fairly obvious error that TidRadio should remedy. If that is what’s happening it could definitely let the magic smoke out of radio circuits. That would match your picture. My Alinco radio has a warning about powering on the radio while the radio and battery is on the charger. I’ll plug it in and see what voltage appears on the battery terminals while charging outside of the battery.

I’ve never seen a battery that could be charged to twice its design voltage, but I admit I’m not an expert on all battery types.

Well, we can hope…. It worked so well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc. Syria was different because the U.S. wasn’t overtly involved. It stands a good chance of succeeding.