On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 01:27:21PM -0700, Bill Johns wrote: | Anyone have any experience with the GreatPlanes Triton charger? Any | comments pro on con are most welcome.
It's a great charger for the money. I have two. It'll pretty much charge anything you throw at it. It'll also discharge and cycle for you. It does have some limitations, however -- -- you have to manually choose the charge rate and battery type, and the number of cells for LiPo and Pb batteries. To some, this is a good thing, to some it's bad ... -- It only does 5 amps for NiCd/NiMH and 2.5 amps for Pb/LiPo. The 2.5 amps is obviously an artificial limitation that they've added, but artificial or not, it's there ... -- I really hate how if the source power gets too low or too high it'll go into it's `INPUT VOLTAGE' screaming mode where it stops whatever it's doing and just beeps that over and over, and forgets about whatever it was doing. So if you were cycling your batteries to determine their capacity, well, it's time to start over unless you happened to notice what the reading was right before it stopped. -- Only one charge port. Though of course you can put two packs in series and charge both at once if you make a charge harness and understand what you're doing and the possible danagers. -- No on-off switch -- 12v power only. -- The fan will come on under some conditions when it's not really needed. (Like in a hot car when you forgot to unplug the charger (and remember, no built in on-off switch), but it's not actually charging anything.) I really should just add an on-off switch myself :) -- It's not really good for `forming' packs, where you need a small current for a long time. The hardware is certainly capable of emitting a 50 mA or 100 mA current for a number of hours, but the firmware doesn't have any such function, so I need to use other chargers for that. Red's battery clinic has a review here -- http://www.rcbatteryclinic.com/triton.htm Overall, I'm pretty happy with mine, and if I needed another, I'd not hesitate to buy it, though the DuraTrax IntelliPeak ICE looks good, except for the 10 cell/4 LiPo cell limitation. -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] A chubby man with a white beard and a red suit will approach you soon. Avoid him. He's a Commie. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
