After spending a day trying to figure out something and maybe attempting multiple approaches, I ultimately came up with this final PCB design. If you're interested in creating schematics and PCBs as well, you can check out the video description for more information on how to try out Altium Designer for free. In combination with Altium 365, which allows you to upload and share your projects easily online, and OctoPart, which allows you to quickly find the right components, is a great all-in-one design package.

Speaking of sponsors, I next uploaded my PCB design to JLCPCB to get them professionally manufactured. They are currently offering free 6-8 Layer PCBs if you are using a coupon. To get them simply visit their coupon center where you can also get other ones for 3D printing, PCB Assembly and normal PCBs. With that being said, I received my boards with the PCBs within a week. At this point I was really excited to populate them with all the SMD components, reflow them, and afterward with the THT components.

Ultimately my circuit looked like this and after adjusting its OpAmp voltage to 1V for the 1A discharge part, I was happy to find out that charging worked beautifully and discharging did also work just fine. The only real problem was that the measured voltage fluctuated quite a bit and the reason for that, was that I simply forgot to add some capacitors. But by simply putting two 1uF ones in series and adding them directly to the analog input of the Arduino, this problem got immediately fixed.

After finishing the Arduino code for the project and uploading it, I did one final test round to make sure that everything worked like planned and once I was sure it did; Inow had the pleasure to build this PCB 5 more times. If you are wondering why I did this, then let me tell you that 3 circuits will be for 5A charging and 3 for 1A and I think with 3 results each there should be a good chance that we can see a trend in the results.

But sadly this plan only partly worked out; because after unpacking my ordered phone batteries, wiring them up with a fuse holder and fuse for protection and then fully charging them up so that I can then fully discharge them with 1A while measuring their capacity, Inoticed that one was apparently faulty. As you can see all of them except one were pretty close to 4000mAh and only battery number three could not even hold half of that energy.

Thankfully though I found another use for it in a previous video. But anyway after I was done testing all my six circuits to make sure that they all charged with the correct current which can be set by a single resistor, it was time to unpack the 12V power supplies and connect them all to mains voltage, the circuits and batteries.

And yes; I know this all looks a bit like a fire hazard; but nothing bad happened in the end and the only thing I regret was that while building the PCBs I accidentally used expired solder paste. This caused lots of problems with the solder connections that I constantly had to repair; but in the end after around 20 days the first batteries still reached 100 charge cycles meaning it was time to one after the other charge them up and discharge them again while measuring their capacity.

And after going through all of that trouble I finally got the results I was interested in; but before showing them to you let me tell you that 100 charge cycles would nowadays probably equal 100 days of charging which is actually not that much, so I was not sure whether you could see any difference at all. According to the 1A charging there really was no difference; except maybe some measuring inaccuracy.

But when it comes to the 5A super fast charging, then there really was a downwards trend visible with capacity drops between 1.2% and 2.3% which on average equals 1.6%. That doesn't sound like much, but when we assume a linear increase of this capacity drop, then after two years we would lose 11.68% of the battery's capacity which is quite a bit.

And that is of course in the best case scenario because I think such a capacity drop gets worse over time. So long story short, according to my results I would recommend to slowly charge your phone's battery if you have the time to spare. With that being said I hope you enjoyed this video which turned out to be a lot more work than I initially planned; but hey I think it was worth it.

If you think so too then don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and I will see you next time.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI think everyone agrees that a low batterynotification sucks and the fastestway to get rid of that nowadays is of coursethe super fast charge feature that can fillup my phone in roughly around an hour.This works because the battery gets chargedup with 5A of current which is a huge differenceto when I normally charge it up wirelesslywith only close to 1A.And that got me thinking whether it is reallyworth it to use super fast charging when youare not in a hurry because I think it stressesthe phones battery way more and thus reducesits capacity and life time.But that is of course just a theory and youwould be crazy to prove it, because that wouldrequire designing a suitable test circuit,do tons of charging cycles and of course measurethe most important values along the way.But of course, as you already have guessed,that is exactly what I did in the last threemonths and in this video I will show you howI did it and ultimately present to you howbad fast charging really is for your phonesbattery.Let's get started!This video is sponsored by JLCPCB and theAltium Designer Software which is the perfectcombination when it comes to firstly designingyour custom PCB and then ordering them forreal.But more about them later.Let's start off with the Game Plan which initiallysounded pretty straightforward.We simply take a phone battery and hook itup to a custom circuit, that firstly dischargesit with 1A down to 3.5V.Why 1A and 3.5V you may ask?Well, while doing some testing with my phone,it seems like 1A of current is pretty normalwhen extensively using it.And 3.5V as the discharge limit is also thevoltage value your phone says that the batteryis empty.OK; next the circuit notices when that limitgot reached and thus switches over to thecharge part where the battery gets chargedup with either 5A or 1A up to a voltage of4.35V.Why 4.35V instead of the normal 4.2V LithiumBatteries use?Well, apparently phone batteries use a slightlyhigher voltage meaning we need to charge upto that voltage to store all the energy.OK; and last but not least as soon as thecharging is complete, the circuit starts allover again and repeats this cycle for let'ssay 100 times.So like I said, initially that all didn'tsound too complicated and I even got a strongstart because the discharge circuit was supersimple to build since it only consists of5 components, like shown here.All we have to do to use it, is to adjustthe opamps trimmer voltage to 1V and hookup the battery which I simulate here withmy lab bench power supply.And there you go; 1A of current gets dischargedinto heat which even stays constant when thebattery voltage drops.This works because the OpAmp will do anythingin its power with its output to achieve thesame voltage on its inputs.And since one input is tied to 1V, the OpAmpoutput will control the MOSFET in such a waythat the voltage drop across this 1ohm resistorwill be 1V as well and who would have guessed;that happens when 1A of current is flowing.Super simple but genius circuit, and of courseby adding an Arduino Microcontroller withdisplay to it, we can directly measure thebattery voltage and keep track of how manycycles we are into this experiment.And to finish the simple part, let me tellyou that with some of the shelf relays itwas super simple to switch between both requiredmodes.But here begins the difficult part becauseno matter how long you search on the internet,you will not find a readily available 4.35V5A Li-Ion Battery charger.Instead the best I could find was this MP2639BIC which can do both I was looking for andworks with only 1 battery cell, perfect.Only problem was that it is usually used forpower banks meaning it can act like a powersource as well which I hoped would not bea problem for my application.So just to be on the safe side, I firstlygot my hands on a dev board around this IC.And after hooking up a battery, as well as12V to its input, it seems to charge perfectlyfine with close to 5A of current, awesome.And best of all; as soon as the circuit wasdone charging, it didn't acted weirdly asa power bank or similar because for that youwould have to pull a certain pin high.And that meant I got my charging prototypeand for the Arduino to notice that it is donecharging, we can simply use the pin for thisLED which is the CHGOK pin.It is low while the battery gets charged upand turns high as soon as the circuit is doneand these two states are perfect indicatorsfor a microcontroller.OK, with that being said we pretty much gotall the basics for my desired circuit andall that was left for me to do at this pointwas fire up the Altium Designer and createa schematic and PCB design that implementsall those ideas which honestly was no thateasy to do.But the good news was that the dev board ofthe charging IC came with good documentationmeaning I knew exactly what components touse and what PCB design is recommended.So after maybe a day of trying some thingout; I ultimately came up with this finalPCB design.And if you want to create schematics and PCBsas well then you can check out the video descriptionto try out Altium Designer for free whichin combination with Altium 365, that allowsyou to upload and share your projects easilyonline, and OctoPart, that allows you to quicklyfind the right components, is a great allin one design package.And speaking of sponsors, I next uploadedmy PCB design to JLCPCB to get them professionallymanufactured and here I can tell you thatthey are currently offering free 6-8 LayerPCBs if you are using a coupon.To get them simply visit their coupon centerwhere you can also get other ones for 3D printing,PCB Assembly and normal PCBs.And with that being said; I received my boardswithin a week and at this point I was reallyexcited to populate them with firstly allthe SMD components, reflow them and afterwardswith the THT components.Ultimately my circuit looked like this andafter adjusting its OpAmp voltage to 1V forthe 1A discharge part, I was happy to findout that charging worked beautifully and dischargingdid also work just fine.The only real problem was that the measuredvoltage fluctuated quite a bit and the reasonfor that, was that I simply forgot to addsome capacitors.But by simply putting two 1uF ones in seriesand adding them directly to the analog inputof the Arduino, this problem got immediatelyfixed.And after finishing the Arduino code for theproject and uploading it, I did one finaltest round to make sure that everything workedlike planned and once I was sure it did; Inow had the pleasure to build this PCB 5 moretimes.If you are wondering why I did this, thenlet me tell you that 3 circuits will be for5A charging and 3 for 1A and I think with3 results each there should be a good chancethat we can see a trend in the results.But sadly this plan only partly worked out;because after unpacking my ordered phone batteries,wiring them up with a fuse holder and fusefor protection and then fully charging themup so that I can then fully discharge themwith 1A while measuring their capacity, Inoticed that one was apparently faulty.As you can see all all of them except onewere pretty close to 4000mAh and only batterynumber 3 could not even hold half of thatenergy.Thankfully though I found another use forit in a previous video.But anyway after I was done testing all my6 circuits to make sure that they all chargedwith the correct current which can be setby a single resistor, it was time to unpackthe 12V power supplies and connect them allto mains voltage, the circuits and batteries.And yes; I know this all looks a bit likea fire hazard; but nothing bad happened inthe end and the only thing I regret was thatwhile building the PCBs I accidentally usedexpired solder paste.This caused lots of problem with the solderconnections that I constantly had to repair;but in the end after around 20 days the firstbatteries still reached 100 charge cyclesmeaning it was time to one after the othercharge them up and discharge them again whilemeasuring their capacity.And after going through all of that troubleI finally got the results I was interestedin; but before showing them to you let metell you that 100 charge cycles would nowadaysprobably equal 100 days of charging whichis actually not that much, so I was not surewhether you could see any difference at all.And according to the 1A charging there reallywas no difference; except maybe some measuringinaccuracy.But when it comes to the 5A super fast charging,then there really was a downwards trend visiblewith capacity drops between 1.2% and 2.3%which on average equals 1.6%.That doesn't sound like much, but when weassume a linear increase of this capacitydrop, then after two years we would lose 11.68%of the batteries capacity which is quite abit.And that is of course in the best case scenariobecause I think such a capacity drop getsworse over time.So long story short, according to my resultsI would recommend to slowly charge your phonesbattery if you have the time to spare.With that being said I hope you enjoyed thisvideo which turned out to be a lot more workthan I initially planned; but hey I thinkit was worth it.If you think so too then don't forget to like,share, subscribe and hit the notificationbell.Stay creative and I will see you next time.