Turning Disposable Vapes into a Fast Charge Power Bank
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People still design new AA battery products because there's almost no other standards. It's crazy.
We need something like USB but for batteries and expansion modules.
Protected cells are hard to find, there are multiple chemistries, it's easy to accidentally put a 14500 in an AA device and break it, etc.
16340 is probably the friendliest cylindrical lithium, but really I think what we need is a square GoPro style battery, with builtin protection, a data channel that can tell the host exactly how to charge it, and that can be safely paralleled or put in series up to a reasonable voltage.
If you used Dallas onewire for the data channels, all you'd need to do to make a pack is put them all in parallel and let the host chip figure it out.
Just like, solve the battery issue once and for all. You could even have coin cell sized versions.
Important note for fellow tinkerers, nearly lost my mind at 2:22: Do not ever solder directly on, or even adjacent to, lithium batteries. Only use spot welders and crimp connections. Once you cut a wire (NEVER cut two wires at once) that leads to a battery, place a Wago clamp on it to make sure it can not short accidentally.
What the guy did at 7:57 is even more inexcusable, one blob of solder misplaced and he'll short the pack. And the tiny main wire, that's NOT going to survive the 30 amps he's gonna pull at 100w out. JESUS. Take the time, install proper connectors, and solder them BEFORE the pack and the PCB are electrically hot.
And also, he left about zero airway for heat to escape. At full load, the inner cells will heat up!
Also, never just take random cells and place them together in a parallel connection. Always measure each individual cell's capacity, only use closely matching cells, always stay 5-10% below the cutoff voltage, and never work with charged cells, only ones with max. 10% charge - only charge cells once they are installed.
And ffs keep a bucket of fine sand nearby when you work with batteries. If a battery makes signs that it is about to go kaboom (it emits smoke, swells up, or catches fire), dump the bucket of sand onto the battery/device, leave the room, close the door and call 911(US)/112(EU).
He's using a 5s arrangement, it looks like - so his 100w fast charging will only be around 5-6A, not 30A, which those wires will probably be OK with (though i would have picked something thicker myself)
Wiring up random batteries into series is definitely not OK, and is perhaps what you meant to refer to.
I personally don't think thermals are an issue in this particular instance. 35 cells are going to laugh at 100w charging (only 3w each). The real risk is a dodgy hidden bad cells, though ideally the BMS detects this regardless.
The real question is why bother with all this effort for a monstrous power bank with shit capacity. 15000mAh is nothing for that many cells.. that's the same capacity as 4-5 brand-new lithium cells, or a 50$ powebank off amazon :/. Those vape cells must be pretty shit (probably 1500mAh power-focused cells, id guess, hence the shit capacity)
Yeah but at least the BMS he uses does balancing to (hopefully) keep the series packs from going into dangerous voltage territory.
A dodgy cell in a parallel pack however, there's no way a standard BMS can detect that, hence pre-install measuring and matching... of course you can go for individual cell protection as well or buy cells with built-in protection but the former is overcomplicated (and hard to get right) for a DIY project, and the latter not an option as the cells from vapes don't have a need for protection circuitry. Hence, matching is a must.
> He's using a 5s arrangement, it looks like - so his 100w fast charging will only be around 5-6A, not 30A, which those wires will probably be OK with (though i would have picked something thicker myself)
Fair point, but still, that's not looking remotely near the 0.5 mm² that one should use for 5-6 amps of current.
That being said who knows how bad these cells are.
I think there's a reason these things are disposable in the first place... only God knows where the f..k the original fly-by-night producer of these vapes sourced them from, or what kind of quality control has been done on them. Or who skipped on a fraction of a cent per piece on a million batteries...
second : how many times do mechanical-contact 18650s need to be attempted before it's settled universally that it's a bad idea for vehicles (like e-bikes that your advertisement mentions)?
I hated the VRUZEND design too and they at least had the insight to use 18650s with overlapped bus-bars for the sake of rigidity and continuity through deformation.
The design that you're using is, imo, most similar to the JAG35 pcb-over-terminal designs -- but as far as I know he doesn't bother trying to use PCBs over loose 18650s; only to interface with existing and pre-welded packs or packs with pre-welded stud interfaces, usually already fairly rigid prismatic packs [0]
PCBs aren't that rigid necessarily; it's easy to imagine conditions in which batteries might drop out of the network. Even with lots of bolts and thick PCBs -- uneven thermal expansion due to a poorly made cell, for example. The kind of conditions that would fry a lot of motor controllers under load should the voltage suddenly change somewhere.
No thanks. Let's stick with welding, it's now dirt-cheap to buy a battery welder and it's not nearly as irreversible as groups that sell things like this would make you believe.
[0]: https://jag35.com/products/fully-assembled-12v-4s2p-1200a-le...
Unless you were tipping the thing upside down and trying to drink it, you’re gonna get, what, a quarter ml at the high end?
So about 5mg of nicotine. Which is about the same amount as in a single piece of nicorette gum.
Even if you drank the whole thing, that’s 40mg. The widely accepted estimate for LD50 is closer to 80mg. Reviews in the past decade have put that into question and it looks like it’s off by an order of magnitude—probably more like 800mg.
You’re gonna puke and generally feel like shit, but unless you inject it straight in your blood stream you’re gonna be fine.
I can only guess, but I think the main driver is probably more just general health and the amount people are (intentionally) putting in their bodies more-so than the potential for poisoning.
Canada limits everything to 20mg/ml. That keeps a typical disposable at 40mg total, but that's probably actually less of a concern since those are generally pretty well sealed. (The manufacturer doesn't want you refilling them when instead you could throw all the electronics and lithium battery straight in the garbage and buy another one! If we actually wanted to do something for the environment, this should have been made illegal two minutes after someone thought it up.)
The bigger concern for poisoning would be the vape juice that's sold for filling the refillable vapes. It's just liquid in a bottle generally sold in 30 and 100ml quantities. Even at 20mg, that gives you a total of 600mg and 2,000mg. So a little 30mg bottle that people leave laying around their house has enough in it to make an adult seriously ill or potentially kill them, and a 100ml bottle has enough that you're well into "most people will die if they drink all of this" territory. This is obviously even more of a concern for kids.
Limiting the concentration to avoid the risk of poisoning would be like limiting vodka to being sold at 5% alcohol or something. It's still a risk of poisoning and it's no longer serving its original purpose.
~96% of it is a mix of essentially harmless vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine is used in cosmetics, lotions, ice creams, and toothpastes, and propylene glycol is commonly found in those 0 calorie water enhancer flavor squirt bottles (like MIO).
The other 4% are the flavors and the nicotine, and the only one I would be extra cautious about is the raw nicotine fluid, as accidentally dumping that all over yourself could expose you to enough nicotine to make you sick or requiring a hospital visit if not thoroughly washed off immediately.
Consumers are paying upwards of $20 for vapes that last less than a week with heavy use, or about 2 weeks with low/average use, so I don't think a dollar saved on batteries is really as much of a concern as "why should I buy your vape vs one of the 5 dozen competitors'"?
Safety is certainly a consideration when contemplating projects like this one but it is by no means the only one and often not even the most important one. Safetyism is what you get when you make it the most important consideration, it is not a recipe for a healthy society.
BTW, if you really want to electrocute yourself that puny little battery won't do the trick, for that you need a a bit more voltage. Never fear, that is easily achieved by taking a few of those plastic snow poles used to mark out roads in colder places and filling them with 18650 cells. A 2 metre pole is good for 30 cells which give you about 130 Volts of DC fully charged. Those cells are capable of pushing quite a bit of current so if you're really into dangerous games that'd be an example of one.
Survivor bias. Look at average life expectancy up until the 1950s... it was shockingly low. Most people had many MANY many children just to see one or two live to adulthood - accidents and pandemics claimed their lives, workplace injuries and wars took them as adults. Your great-grandfather likely had four to five siblings [1], earlier generations were at around seven in the US [2].
It's only because of vaccines, OSHA, antibiotics and medicine that human life expectancy has exploded over the last decades. House fires are among the most stubborn killers that still remain, the numbers are going down extremely slowly [3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-fertility-has-halved
[2] https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a...
It's not learn-as-you-go like computers. A mistake doesn't give compiler errors. It might just kill you now, or get red hot later under certain conditions you haven't tested.
If you can't see that this gongshow is obviously dangerous then you are a fool.
Suggestion: (to video maker)
1. Leave the design open source, create a second design (more efficient/whatever you think defines the declaration of value).
2. Package second design parts together for sale and let the public purchase so they can run around and find disposable vapes and make their own.
3. Profit.
No need for steps 4 and 5. (Rinse & Repeat new models).