Charger Panasonic BQ-CC14





Panasonic has a line of NiMH chargers, some are fast and smart, others dumb. This one here is a two channel usb powered smart charger.



I got the charger in a blister pack. In addition to the charger there was some Panasonic Evolta cells, I have moved them to my review queue. I bought the charger on Ebay and did also get a usb power supply, but it did not work.



The Panasonic contents was: The charger, 2 Evolta cells and a instruction sheet in many languages.



The usb plug is folded around the charger and is easy to take out.



The charger has one hidden led to show charge status. It is flashing when charging and steady lit when done.



The charger has a tiltable spacer that can change the length of the slots between AA and AAA.
This design means the charger can either charge AA or AAA, not both AA and AAA at the same time.



There are some springs in the other end of the slots.









Measurements charger

• Blue led is flashing when charging, the led is common for both slots.
• Led will be steady lit when both channels are finished
• It will start charging from 0 volt.
• When charge is finished the charger will charge with less than 0.2mA.
• Charger will not restart if voltage drops.
• Charge will restart charging after power loss, or battery insertion.
• Low current draw (<0.05mA) from batteries when not powered

The charger uses -dv/dt termination on this cell and it stops very fast after the cell is full, there is not top-off or trickle charging. This looks very good.



The other channel looks the same.



The XX stops on -dv/dt.



On the Pro it stops "premature", but lookin on the capacity scale it must be just about full.
It also looks like there is the start of a temperature raise.



Again it stops early and again it looks like the battery is full.



This is a nice -dv/dt termination, again done very soon after the voltage peak.



With the full eneloop it takes some time to detect it.



With 2 cells in the charger the current is reduced, to keep the usb power below 500mA.



Same curve as above, but with input current removed. This makes it possible to see the 400mA average charge current.



M1: 31,7°C, M2: 32,0°C, M3: 37,4°C, HS1: 43,5°C
The charger uses a fairly low charge current, this keeps the battery temperature low.



The charger needs about 3 seconds to start.



The charger is using pulsing current. The current in the pulses is about 0.9A.



With two batteies it uses same current, but only half the time for each battery.




Conclusion

The charger is very good at stopping exactly when the batteries are full. It does also stay within usb specifications (i.e. 0.5A current), this makes the charge current a bit slow with two batteries. The batteries are fairly cool during charge.

This is a very good NiMH charger.



Notes

Here is an explanation on how I did the above charge curves: How do I test a charger