Li-ion charging in a Taranis X9d + 2019 transmitter

[Geoff Parkes]

I have just purchased a taranis X9D plus 2019 transmitter, this is my first dip into open tx technology, as you may know you dont get a battery with this transmitter, so i also purchased a 2s1p 2040ma/h Li-ion battery(all from the very helpfull Richard at t9), you do not get a charger either with the transmitter, you charge through the USB port, the transmitter does have an onboard charging curcuit , but does anyone own one of these new transmitters and can advise me what charger they use? the users manual from T9 gives a spec,for the charger of less than 5 volts@ 2.1 amps via the USB socket, does anyone know of a suitable charger ?

[Ron Gray]

As per my post on the other thread, I use the USB charger on my 2019 TX and haven’t had an issue with that over the last year.

[EarlyBird]

I use my laptop USB mainly but have used a Camera USB charger.

Cheers

Steve

[Geoff Parkes]

Earlybird , sorry for being dim, but my computer knowlege is limited, do i just connect the one end of the lead supplied with the tranny to the USB port in the battery bay of the tranny and the other end into my computer ? , will the computer just then charge the battery or do i have to do something to the computer to get it work ? i have been using a charger set to Li-ion but this does not balance charge, i am assuming that the on board charger in the tranny works this out as there are only 3 wires from the battery and no balancing wires, many thanks for your help, as i said previously after 30 odd years as a Futaba user, i am slowly coming to grips with open TX, its taken a month to programme my first model into the tranny, but it is slowly coming together, i doubt if i will ever get near to what this thing can fully do, but my aim is to slowly extend my knowlege , as you use the tranny you slowly discover what took a day to get to work previously becomes second nature , regards Geoff.

[EarlyBird]

Geoff no computer knowledge required.

Connect one end to the computer USB port and the other small end to the back of the TX.

That is it. Obviously the computer has to be on.

The computer USB port is simply a 5V DC supply and the TX contains the charging circuitry.

When I said charger in my previous post that was an error as the camera uses an AC adapter with a fixed 5V DC output, the same as the USB port on computers and many other USB ports for example mobiles that have USB cables.

Cheers

Steve

[Martin_K]

To charge the two Li ion cells internally in my Taranis X-Lite Pro I use a USB switching power supply, Model MWUSB3UK, 5V, 2100mA. I bought a few of these from CPC years ago to power Arduino and Raspberry Pi type devices. A search for this part number at CPC now shows suggested replacements.

I do also use a USB port on my PC but my experience with the X-Lite is this must be a 'charging port', typically indicated by yellow plastic inside the USB socket. If connected to a standard USB port the Taranis radio draws current in excess of what the port can handle.

I am puzzled by the user manual reference to a charger of "less than 5 volts@ 2.1 amps". Possibly they mean no more than 5V?

Edited to add;

Computer knowledge may be required. Whether the USB ports supply power when the computer is 'sleeping' or off may be configurable in setup, i.e. bios. It is on mine.

Edited By Martin_K on 10/10/2020 11:06:59

Edited By Martin_K on 10/10/2020 11:07:41

[Geoff Parkes]

steve , sorry to be a pain, i have connected the cable as your suggestion, but how do i check its charging, the manual tells me there is a green light to the bottom left looking at the rear of the tranny,it does mentionX9d +legacy models ,not certain if this is on the 2019 version, should i be looking any where else for evidence of charging ?

[Ron Gray]

It is the On/OFF switch that has a light in it when charging. (Tx off when charging).

Edited By Ron Gray on 10/10/2020 15:13:33

Edited By Ron Gray on 10/10/2020 15:14:01

[EarlyBird]

Connected to laptop

and charging

When charged the green on/off light goes dark blue.

Cheers

Steve

[Geoff Parkes]

Steve , Ron, many thanks for your patience with me, i have a 5 year old Toshiba computer, its got so many ports on each side and accross the front , just used the ports to the right of the computer, but on the other side next to the power jack is another port which has a blue bar , i think one of the guys said was a power out port, i plugged into this and low and behold it WORKS, as i said before many many thanks for bearing with me on this problem, now onto sorting the rest of the tranny. have either of you managed to put speech onto your tranny, i have a 16 gig micro sd card and Richard at T9 has sent me speech files do i just down load the files onto the card and put into the tranny or do i connect the tranny to the computer to do this ?Regards Geoff.

[Phil Olson - Model Technics]

either way will work - just make sure you put the sound filesin the "SOUNDS" folder

[GrumpyGnome]

Hi Geoff

Sounds like model names etc. go in SOUNDS/EN (assuming english is the language you want); system sounds, e.g. the welcome message, are in SOUNDS/SYSTEM I think.

In either case, they need to be wav files, 32k or under sample rate and mono; i think there is also a limit on how long the file name can be - mine are all maximum 7 alphanumeric characters. I use Audacity to create/manipulate sound files - free and quite simple to use.

Loads of youtube vids and written articles via Google, for both OpenTx sound, and Audacity.

Remember to take a backup first, either by manually copying the sounds directory, or via Companion.

GG

[Gervaise Vernon Retail manager StarLoc]

I take my lipo pack out of the X9D ( and all transmitters ) to charge it using the same charger I use to do flight packs.

Many years ago I had a Futaba Challenger NiCad pack go on fire when charging ( on the standard charger ) , it destroyed the transmitter, Since then I have always removed batteries to charge them especially lipos .