NITECORE Digicharger D4 LCD Display Universal Smart Charger

Ok, let me have my say about this battery charger. Pretty much all reviews are more than positive and yes - it is a good charger (with some concerns). But is it really "the most advanced" charger as it states in its own manual?

Let me start with the overwhelming advantages:

• It charges almost any usual battery on the market (I will exclude NiZn batteries since they are rather unusual anyway), just to mention them: Li-ion / IMR / LiFePO4: 26650, 22650, 18650, 17670, 18490, 17500, 18350, 16340 (RCR123), 14500, 10440, Ni-MH / Ni-Cd: AA, AAA, AAAA, C.
• Independent slots - monitors and charges independently (but only 2 charging circuits, see further below)
• Battery type is automatically detected + different charge modes (Constant Current (CC), Constant Voltage (CV), -dV/dt).
• Low current charging mode for small capacity batteries (that is what convinced me to buy it)
• Attempts to charge fully discharged batteries.
• Hard time limit to charge - max 20 hours per battery - then it supposed to stop.
• Option to use 12V adapter.

At that point, it is pretty convincing that we are talking about rather decent battery charger. But here is what I think it is missing (or I am missing compared to some older chargers I have mentioned before IPC-1 and CM-410).

rtl_433: simple text monitoring panel

There is this really nice rtl_433 "application using librtlsdr to decode the temperature from a wireless temperature sensor (433.92MHz)"  https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which does exactly what is says. 

I just thought that I can write a simple script that will keep showing only the latest decoded data.
As one can see in the example output, further below, some of the sensors sends the data 3 times and if you have couple of them the data starts to get a bit difficult to read. With a small awk script (tailored for my needs) I can get this simple output that contains only the interesting data and few colors to prettify it:

===================================================================================
|        Time         |               Name             |  ID  |  Temp |   %  | Bat
===================================================================================
| 2016-03-07 10:26:19 | Gym - WT450                    |   61 |   5.4 |  84% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:26:13 | Outdoor - Nexus                |   92 |   1.5 |  90% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:51 | Indoor  - WT450                |  131 |  20.1 |  27% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:45 | Outdoor - WT450                |  151 |   2.0 |  94% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:37 | Ventilation - Nexus            | 1281 |  17.8 |   0% | OK
===================================================================================

BTY AAA1350, rechargeable NiMH batteries - first and last impression

Right, since they were not that expensive, I somehow did not make the effort to search on the net for reviews, so I ended up with a pack of BTY AAA1350 rechargeable batteries. From the packaging, they went straight in the charger for evaluation - first discharge with 100 mA, then fully charging them with 200 mA current.

The results are more than disappointing. I should have run the TEST mode of the charger, which should have reported the capacity upon discharge, but this value is usually less that the value during the charging. Anyway the numbers are so bad that this does not matter. One battery stores 78 mAh which essentially means it is completely death. The other three were about 270 mAh which actually fits the reports from other discussions on the net.

Weather station Prologue IW006-DCF (Clas Ohlson 36-5364)

Well... on this one. Let's start with the good.

Advantages:

• Very nice weather station with color display that does not need Internet to show the weather! Everything else I found wanted to show me some nice pictures, temperature and forecast from some weather service. I can easily use my 3 years old tablet for this, if I wanted.
• Indoors and outdoors temperature and humidity readings. It has wireless remote sensor that pair with the station without any problems.
• Constantly lighted large screen where the time numbers are the largest - yes that is what I want!
• Radio time synchronization - it has the most stable synchronization from all of my clocks with such feature.
• Battery backup.
• Pressure sensor with some sort of forecast.

Disadvantages:

Eaton 3S 550 and Raspberry Pi

Briefly about the setup: Eaton 3S 550 powers a constantly running Raspberry Pi (RPi), wireless router, ADSL modem, cordless phone, wireless energy monitor (Eliq) and home automation device (Tellstick Net). All in all they are 10% of the UPS capacity which gives me about 30 minutes safety window before the RPi will shut down (shut down is triggered when battery is below 20%).

The Raspberry is running latest Raspbian and monitors the UPS using Network UPS Tools (NUT) which can power off the computer, send notifications etc. I have set up script to log the events and get an SMS on power failures (using Android phone and SMS Gateway).

Below is a screenshot from the NUT monitor GUI and results from a test run of the setup. I have manually started a bash script to collect the battery status by pooling every 15 seconds with "upsc eaton3s@localhost | grep battery.charge:"