Charger

methinks a CD4060 would be preferable

Martin

Good old mechanical should do fine. Set it for an overnight charge time that's "long enough", and if it gets far enough off track that you find it charging in the daytime, spin the dial until it's back on night. Time to build - 0. Time to reset in case of enough power outage to matter -

10 seconds. Cost - $5 or so? Plug all your chargers into an outlet strip driven off of it.

If (rather than a nightly charge) you want it to charge for 1-12 hours when you drop a battery in to charge, get a different mechanical timer -

12 hour exhaust fan timer, spin the knob to start it and set the charge time. Again, right off the shelf at the hardware/electrical supply.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

good idea and insight, just get mechanical clock based unit, click in

5-10 hours of juice every day and viola..

alterativley, you could get a digitally delay and counter chip, couple to a relay for more precise, on touch power cycle intiatation use!

Either way is better than cooking em to death ;-)

Marco Polo

There used to be a product that was just a clock with an on-off switch, and little mechanical things to set the on and off times. I've always called it a "coffee timer", but you see similar things on water sprinkler systems and stuff.

Unfortunately, a 10-minute (or so) google search turns up nothing.

It seems like you could find one in any housewares store, where they sell pots and pans and teflon spatulas and stuff; maybe they stopped selling, so they dropped it.

But wander around your local general store, housewares store, target, kmart, wally world, etc, in the department with the apple corers and measuring spoons.

Good Luck! Rich

Or maybe build an automatic shut off (based on terminal voltage) into the charger? When the battery reaches full charge, the charge shuts off, regardless of time.

Ed