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I am INCREDIBLY proud to announce my first branded product. It's the parallel charge board I always wished somebody would make. 

Okay... I know that's not sexy like a frame or a flight controller, but charging our packs is something we all have to do, and parallel charging is, simply put, the ONLY fast and cheap way of charging lots of smaller packs, like mini quad pilots use.

What makes this board so good is that it only has 4S balance ports. If you have a bunch of 3S, 5S, and 6S batteries, this isn't for you. But the vast majority of us have a ton of 4S packs. So get rid of all those un-used balance ports, and now you have enough room on the board to fit TEN plugs. Most other boards have either 4 or 6.

Did you know that the fuses on most other boards are direct-soldered to the board? If you burn one out, you can't just pull it out of a housing and slide a new one in. When I first learned this, my jaw was on the floor. So the fuses in this board are in proper housings, and if you make a mistake and burn one out, you can easily replace it. No soldering iron required.

This board comes with an XT60 plug for ISDT chargers, and an adapter for chargers that take banana plugs.

Finally, the board has a built-in voltage checker so you can easily check the voltage level of batteries before plugging them in. Just plug them in one at a time before plugging all of them in to the board for charging!

My video on this product will go live in about 9 hours, but for those of you who are reading your email between now and then and want to beat the rush, you can order here: https://goo.gl/FqtQGG

Thank you so much as always for your support.

Joshua

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Comments

Anonymous

That looks like a great piece of kit Josh! I'll definitely be picking one up in my next order of parts from the US.

Anonymous

Haha, ruining the hobby.... One parallel charge at a time :P Congrats Josh, I wish you luck in getting more products with your name on them.

Anonymous

What is the max current the board is designed to handle? For each XT-60, it is obviously 15A but the 12 Gauge wire can't handle 15A for each of the 10 connectors (150A).

thedroneracingengineer

Not sure what you're charging at 150 amps but let's just assume the question is rhetorical ;-) The fuses are there to protect against a fault condition. It's not expected that you'll charge anywhere near the actual rating of the fuses. But if you short something or plug in a battery of the wrong voltage, you'll blow the fuse and be protected.

Anonymous

I totally love this. This is better than daisy chaining boards which I haven't done to save space at my desk. Ordered!!! Now I'll be able to charge 16 batteries at once between my two chargers. I never take more than that flying so this will save me a second round of charging in the mornings or evenings before going out to fly.

Chris R. (OneWD)

Ordered, because well... who can't use a better paraboard? Lol.

Anonymous

Got one on the way! This will greatly reduce my down time...at least from charging...probably won't do much for down time due to crappy flying skills. 😜

thedroneracingengineer

You guys are awesome. I've been watching the in-stock quantity go down on the product page all night.

Anonymous

Nothing more than a quality product from a guy that knows it all 😉 well done buddy. May this be the first of many to make this hobby better and safer. I would have ordered one but the shipping was more than the product 🇬🇧 Good luck and thank you for everything you do for us 👻

Anonymous

Looks nice and at a fair price. Any resetting fuses on the balance ports side?

Anonymous

Looks awesome Josh. I have 2 on the way.

Anonymous

That is exactly what I needed, Josh. Perfect timing. I normally fly in my back yard so charging things up a couple at a time on multiple chargers isn't a big deal. But this weekend I was going out and needed to just charge everything. My first thought was, "I wish I had listened to Joshua and ordered a parallel charger already." Now I will have one in a few days.

Anonymous

Sweet man! Glad you are getting branded products out there. I just placed an order to get it. I'm a noob so I only have 8 batteries that need to be charged at any one time so this will be more than enough for me.

thedroneracingengineer

No. That would have put the price of the board too high and taken up too much space. What I would suggest is that you plug in the XT60 first and, if there is unsafe current flow, the fuse will pop. Then plug in balance and you know you're good. There is still some risk in that the 15 amp fuse would allow, say, 10 amps to flow between batteries which, if they were like 1500 mAh, that would probably not result in a fire, but it wouldn't be good for the receiving battery if it went on for very long. But if you were to use smaller fuses, you'd have a lot more risk of an unintentional pop. Maybe if you could get slow-blow fuses that didn't pop until the current was sustained, that would be best. IDK... I'm just thinking out loud here.

Anonymous

Congrats, JB! I'll be getting one with my next RMRC order soon.

Anonymous

Now thats a nice board ..... bought

Chris R. (OneWD)

And... they're sold out, glad I got mine. Well done @joshua bardwell!

Anonymous

Congrats on your first product!

Anonymous

Our team is anti-parallel charge as we track IR, cell status, and a slew of stats in a dedicated application (built in house). From our research, including 3 years of tracking batteries and data with thousands of entries and additional work looking into LiPo chemistry and physics we stopped parallel charging. Our work has led us to believe that parallel charging kills batteries faster, increases the chance of sag, increases fire and explosion risk considerably, and bypasses helpful monitoring of battery health and charge safety. I don't want this to come off as trolling. Quite the opposite as I have people very close to me who have lost their house, pets, and all they own because battery safety was ignored. In my past I lost a house to electrical fire. Feedback?

thedroneracingengineer

My position is that parallel charging in and of itself is not unsafe. I mean, you can argue that owning LiPos at all is unsafe. How many people out there are still flying packs that have been beat up or otherwise damaged to the point where every charge cycle is a dice-roll? Personally, parallel charging makes me more aware of my batteries' status, since I have to pay attention to the cells every time I charge. I can't just slap the pack on the charger and hit "go" and assume the charger will take care of everything. I do agree that there may be some reduction in pack life from parallel charging. Not that parallel charging itself reduces pack life, but that if you parallel charge with one bad cell in the array, all the other cells in parallel will be affected by it. Say you have one battery with cell 1 that has high IR. All of the other cells-1 in the array will charge slower because that one is pulling them down, and the other cells (2, 3, 4, etc.) will have a longer balance cycle during which they are being slowly discharged. Any time you discharge a LiPo, you're reducing its life. But what's the alternative? I talked with Stew (UAVfutures) yesterday and he said he uses a quad-channel charger. Four of them. So he can charge 16 batteries at once. Great! Each charger is $200. Not great. He has $800 invested in his charging setup so he can charge 16 batteries at once. I have two balance boards at $15 each, plus a $60 charger. How much extra cycle life are you really getting from your packs vs mine? How long do our packs really last anyway, given how much we abuse them? But hey that's my argument and I respect that not everybody agrees with it.

Anonymous

Awe totally missed this, but I'm on the waiting list. I'll balance charge like a common savage until then!

Anonymous

congratulations, looks nice, now design one for us 3s types :-)

Anonymous

Good work Josh, thanks for your contribution to the hobby .

Anonymous

Hey Joshua, I have another product idea. Maybe not a great one but one that I'd find useful. We already have a battery storage discharger - it's called a 'flight'. But what if you charge up all of your batteries of various ratings and don't have any flights. The answer is a single XT60 storage discharge unit. These would have smarts for different cell counts and maybe dip switches for discharge rate.

thedroneracingengineer

The challenge here is that the load must be able to soak a lot of energy. Building a high-wattage load gets expensive and it makes a LOT of heat. I'm working on building a 2000 watt load for my battery testing, and it's in the range of a few hundred dollars.