Turnigy Accucell 6 mod 1 - adding the USB connectivity that really works

I own this decnt, reliable and cheap battery charger for a few years now (I paid for it with my own money, it's not an ad). It works great and I havent got any problems with it - except loud cooling fan which I repaired with a drop of oil.

I do recommend this charger as it is still offered by HobbyKing and its really good value for the money - 23$ (August 2013).

I was always qurious about that menu options allowing you to switch the USB - Enable. If you've got it, you know that there is no usb connector, only 3 pin temp sensor input (it doesn't output anything). Well, I've done some research and found out that there is a possibility to plug this charger to computer and graphically present charging status. Which is really cool if you know how to interpret the data. But the most important thing is that it's really easy to mod the charger, and you need only a few cheap additional parts.  It took me 30 minutes to have it working, so why don't you give it a try.

The things that you will need:

• TTL Logic Level USB Serial Port Adapter - 1,40$ or similar
• few wires
• soldering stations
• and LogView software

There are some drawbacks unfortunately, it seems like there are different versions of this charger on the market now, and some of them might not be suitable for this mod (even the original Turnigy ones). Nonetheless, if your charger looks like the one on the picture, you've got menu option USB Enable, and internal board is identical you can be sure it will work. LogView is not fully translated into English, some words are still in German - but it's very usable.  

 At the end you can expect to be able to see actual charging status on the PC screen with graphs and data logging capability. Charging current, voltage of each cell, total voltage, energy delivered to the battery, charger supply voltage, total charging power all over time. It can help with faulty bateries, but it can help also understand how the charging process really is. The data refreash rate is close to 1s (1Hz). LogView can present data in many ways - as a chart, table, gauge etc. Graphs can be easily customized.

The connection is very simple, you have to connect just 2 wires from the Serial Port Adapter

• Adapter GND goes to GND on the charger board
• Adapter RDX goes to DATA (TXD) on the charger  

And that's it. Hardware part of the mod is ready. All the rest is software:

• Serial port adapter driver installation
• LogView installation (for Turnigy Accucell 6 choose Bantam eStation BC-6 from the devices list and COM port corresponding to Serial port adapter). 

Remember to set the charger menu USB option ENABLE.

If you are lucky and managed to done everything right you'll see similar charts during charging :).

To be on the cheap side (if it's possible at all), you can use an old cell phone data cable that you might already have instead of that TTL Logic level USB Serial port adaptor. I tried Foof cable for LG B2050 with the same PL2303HX chip and additional resistor voltage divider and it works also.

In the future I'm going to apply another mod to the charger, a much cooler version of data transmision. That is going to be "mod 2".