My batteries arrived today - Zippy 4200mah / 13.2v and I have the Turnigy charger.
I think I am missing something to connect the battery + & - cables to the charger output.
I think I need and adapter? Maybe one like
The battery has the 5.5mm bullet connectors on the end of the wire.
Cheers
You can easily get just the bullet connectors (e.g. Ebay) and make up a lead to Powerpole/whatever. Probably a good place to include fuses too. Of course you can always chop off the bullet connectors (very carefully – not both at once!), remembering that you need to charge it too.
My charger came with a stack of leads. One is the charger to a strange T connector and then many leads to connect to that including a 5.5mm bullet lead. I was reluctant to remove the bullet connectors from the battery as someone had just bought the same cell that failed quickly. I wanted to be sure my cell was OK before I removed the bullets in case there was an issue claiming on the warranty with the bullets removed. The next cell I bought had bare leads.
I standardised on Tyton T connectors a long time back when everyone was getting the hots for Power Poles. Power Poles were very expensive and I’d used Tyton T’s in my job so I knew how they performed etc. and had a bag of them for free! There were enough leads provided with the charger that I could cut off connectors I’d never use and fit Tyton T’s and also I made a 5.5mm bullet to Tyton T. It took an hour or so to make the adapters I needed out of what came with the charger. It was a bit annoying that I couldn’t immediately play with my new toys.
You can probably buy the right lead from HobbyKing. Or eBay. Or buy the bits and make your own. Just remember the amount of current you can draw in a fault condition so if you make your own, make sure it cannot short out in normal use, or more importantly abnormal use when you are not thinking!
I quite like the XT connectors. XT60 (30-A rated) would be a nice connector to choose if I hadn’t gone to Powerpole. They’re common (you can even get them from RS) and you can’t make the mistake of connecting a fresh battery to the battery you just discharged! You have to be a bit careful soldering not to melt them though.
I learnt that from soldering RG-174… you don’t get long before the inner dielectric turns to liquid resulting in inner to screen shorts and melted polyethylene stuck to your fingers. After 50years of burning my fingers soldering and 20+ years diabetic nerve damage, liquid polyethylene still hurts like mad on the finger tips! It’s why I like Teflon cables… I can’t melt them. Though since I finally invested in a crimp tool for BNC/SMA the burnt connector / finger syndrome has been much reduced 
Cheers all. I did get some cables with the charger, but none to be able to connect the battery to the charger.
I have ordered some bullet connectors. SOTA/Portable ops with FT-857 is getting closer…
For what it’s worth, I bought a lead that had xt90 on one end and just soldered powerpoles on the other end. I think it was a fiver off ebay. It saved chomping the ‘always live’ battery leads and trying to solder connectors on to them.
Many ways to skin a cat…
Fraser
I am planning on adding a pair of bullets to a spare Anderson connector and this will connect to the radio.
Yup, many ways to skin a cat.
cheers
john
How odd, I have a very similar battery and it came with a separate charging connector already permanently attached. It allows each cell to be separately charged.
That’s the balance connector. Bulking charging is done through the main cable. Although some chargers will do low current charging through the balance connector alone, they can’t do faster charging that way.
Ahhh I think that has explaing it. I thought the multi pin was to allow the charger to see the voltage at each cell and that the two power wires supplied the charge to the battery. I was looking to connect the the two power wires to the outlet side of the charger?
cheers
john
Mine charges up at about 2.4 Amps per cell with my charger through that connector, which isn’t an expensive one. You an increase the charging current by pressing a button on the charger but I’ve never been in a hurry so I haven’t tried this yet.
So i dont need to connect the battery via the postive and negative wires, just use the multipin connector?
cheers
John
Depends on the charger. Mine fast charger needs both. My old slow LiPo only charger uses just the balance connector.
Of course I don’t need to say RTFM before you connect up any kind of Lithium battery.
I don’t and I don’t think you are supposed to. Lithium batteries should be charged by a system which can monitor the state of each cell.
If you look at the larger lithium batteries you can get for vehicles they have a battery management system (BMS) built in to them. This allows the battery to be charged through its terminals but within the battery the BMS is controlling what each cell receives.
The Zippy batteries have no BMS built in so the BMS is in the charger instead - and to work it needs to see each cell. If you just charge them through its output cables this will work but this method is likely to have an adverse effect on battery life.
The manual for the Turnigy does show a battery connected via the main power feeds. So it does look like this charger does need to use the main power cables. Not a problem I will cease and await the arrival of a few more bits.
On the plus side, a quick test shows the radio is happy to be powered via the Zippy so there is some charge.
Earlier LIPO chargers only connected via the small multipin connector and balance charged the cells. More modern chargers still have the small connector connected to do the balanced charging but also require the main thick output leads to be connected to the charger as well. These more modern chargers have features like being able to reduce the charge in the battery down to a level suitable for longer term storage or to recycle and recover what appears to be a dead battery (if you’re lucky).
73 Ed.
You must have a different Turnigy charger to mine 
which can only be connected via the multi-pin plug. But it can’t do what DD5LP mentions which is reducing the charge for storage.
I meant charging it only through the output leads, which I thought was what was being suggested. Thanks for the clarification.
