TP4056 In Parallel???

Ok, I finally got my TP4056's in. I had hooked up one of them to at least get a little familiar with it and charged 2 cells up.

So, I took 4 units and soldered wires onto each of the 4 pads and hooked the appropriate +/- to the contacts for the battery holder (which, is a 4-bank holder).

Then I took all the +'s and soldered them together, and all the -'s likewise together. Hooked up the power, and I get 4 beautiful blue led's saying "Hi!"

However, when I plug in 1 cell into any of the of slots, they "all" turn to red. Upon checking the voltage on the charge side, they "all" read 4.2v output. Unhook the power, and the voltages start to drop till it reaches 0v.

Now, why do they all do that??? :huh: Shouldn't each one only change state when a cell is connected to only that particular unit???

Am I missing something here?? :huh: :s :dodgy: :huh:

So ....here's a picture of one ...


power comes in on the left and the ouput to one cell comes out the right ... you can probably put the input power from the same source ...ie put the inputs in parallel , but each cell must be separate from the others ,if you want to charge at 1A ... I think that's all correct ....ridiculously cheap less than 48p(UK) each , but only for charging .

You can tie all the power input wires together, but the output sides must be separate if you want to supply 1 amp to a battery. The way you have it wired is sending 4 amps to your battery holders.
That's ok if you want a 4 amp charger, but I suspect you don't.
Run a positive and neg wire from each module to one battery holder.
The terminals on your holder are all connected, and they shouldn't be if you want to charge 4 cells independently .
You might want to post a pic if this isn't making sense.

That's what I did. Each cell is separate. Only the inputs are parallel. As soon as 1 cell gets dropped in, they all go red/charging and start dumping voltage. I don't get it. Could I have goofed up something when I was soldering? I checked all the connections and nothing is shorting out anywhere.

I think I figured it out, though. For some reason, even though my PS-brick is rated for 5v@2A, it's only putting out .6 amps. As soon as second module gets connected, the amps drop to <.3amps and they all go red. I have to pull all the cells out to reset them and plug only 1 back in.


I had taken pics of the process, but apparently when the files were saved on the phone, they got flash white washed. grrr. Ohwell, like I said, I think I may have figured it out.

Plus, I had 1 plugged in for the past cpl hours, and I noticed that the PS-brick was pretty warm. At .6amp, it shouldn't have been that warm at all. I wonder if it's busted.

Tomorrow I'm gonna see about taking a computer PS and retro-fitting it to my makeshift rig. Maybe that'll take care of the issues.


Sooooo, in in the end, it was my own goof up that was causing the issues Ah well, live and learn.

Yeah you're going to need to supply at least 4 amps to the modules. You cant get 4 amps out of a 2 amp supply.
I didnt really think of that, I assumed the supply was adequate.

A computer power supply will work well. It should be capable of supplying 20 amps or more.

As an idiot check, your cell holder wouldn't happen to be 4 in parallel, e.g all the cells are parrelleled by the holder before you wired it.

No, I specifically bought the ones that were all in singles.

But not being able to supply enough current would definitely make them go bonkers. Like I said, I thought that the 2A supply would be sufficient, but apparently there must be something wrong with it since it's only allowing <1A output. Gotta figure out what's going on with that.

Thanks for the info/ideas, though

Korishan said:

No, I specifically bought the ones that were all in singles.

But not being able to supply enough current would definitely make them go bonkers. Like I said, I thought that the 2A supply would be sufficient, but apparently there must be something wrong with it since it's only allowing <1A output. Gotta figure out what's going on with that.

Thanks for the info/ideas, though

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I just had a similar problem. A guy solved it for me though. I was using some wire that was of dubious quality, and as soon as I put any load on it, it would drop the volts because the wire had too much resistance. I simply got rid of the bad wire and things went very smooth from then on. I hope that helps.

I actually haven't had much messing around with the cells since early March. I do need to get busy back to working with them.

I hadn't though about the wiring being the problem as each one has their own wire from the PSU. However, each one is a single solid core and I suppose it's possible they have to much resistance.

I saw a video where someone took Cat5 cable and used the individual wires to make all their soldering connections. That wire is pretty much guaranteed to be good. I have plenty of Cat5 scrap laying around. So I'll end up redoing the wiring using those wires and recheck everything.