Good day!
Today we're gonna take a look at the M9 Charger from ToolkitRC. It's a 600
watt multifunctional charger that can handle just about anything you want to throw at it!
It’s a smart charger that knows 9 different languages! That's right, it talks!
Of course, we'll take a quick look at its features highlighting the differences
between the M9 and the other chargers on the market which make it stand out from the crowd,
but I'm also going to take a different approach on this one. You see,
it has a customizable start-up (or boot) image and voice packs. So, I'm also going
to demonstrate how you can make your own custom startup image and sounds for your M9 charger.
Then, I'll wrap things up by doing a parallel charging demo!
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So, let's take a look at its ports. I've already mentioned this ToolkitRC M9 charger
is multifunctional. On the output side you have your standard XT60 connecter
and balance port, except this one can go all the way up to 8S
(or 8 cell) batteries! In the middle you have a signal port where you can output and test PWM,
PPM, and SBUS signals. Then you have both USB-C and USB-A ports with a maximum output of 65 watts
that support dual fast-charging of any of your mobile devices using Power Delivery,
Quick Charge, and other fast charge protocols. On the left side of the M9 charger, you see
you have an internal fan that kicks on at 45 degrees Celsius at half speed only to reduce
the noise level and if the temperature gets above 53 degrees Celsius it turns on full speed
to more quickly dissipate the heat through ventilation over here on the right side.
At the back of the ToolkitRC M9 charger you have an XT60 connection for your DC power input
which can take anywhere from 7 to 35 volts and a maximum of 25 amps.
Next to that you have your SD card slot (and the M9 charger comes with its own SD card),
however, you may want to upgrade that with a higher quality name brand so at
least you have a backup. I usually go with Sandisk 16Gb SD cards which I have linked
below and you can usually get between 5 – 10 dollars on Amazon. The SD card contains your
start-up (or boot) image and your audio files both of which you can customize and I'll
show you how easy that is to do here in a bit. Next to the SD card slot you have your speaker
which I find surprisingly sounds pretty nice! Up top, you have a very nice 2.4 inch
320x240 resolution color display that swivels up to 85 degrees
so you can setup your perfect viewing angle.
In today's video, I'm gonna start by powering the M9 charger with my 100 watt
smartphone wall charger and the ToolkitRC SC100 protocols cable, which I went over
in a previous video you can check out through a link below. I'll use a separate 240 watt power
supply when we do our parallel charging demo. Let's quickly walk through a few (not all)
of the features it has in its menu system then we'll get to our customization demonstration.
For a more detailed explanation, I'll refer you to the comprehensive 44 page User's
Manual made available through a link below. When you first power up your M9 charger, you'll
see your boot logo for about 2 seconds and at the same time your start-up audio file will play.
Then, your main interface screen will be displayed. This is basically your home screen.
Here's where you'll use your scroll wheel to select your battery types.
This ToolktRC M9 charger supports 9 different types of batteries
and also has 4 different types of DJI drone batteries.
You'll also want to select the number of cells your battery has,
and the work mode (whether that's charge, discharge,
or storage charge). For this video, I'm only going to demonstrate charging.
You'll also want to set your charge current and it's recommended you charge at a rate of 1-2C
or 1-2 times the milliamp hour capacity if it's a LiPo or high voltage LiHV battery. If it’s a Li
Ion battery, the recommended charge rate is 1/2C. I'll be charging this 4S 650 mah LiHV battery.
To charge one of these batteries that uses an XT30 connector using your ToolkitRC M9 charger
that has the XT60 connecter, you just need to get one of these XT30 to XT60 adapters which you can
either make yourself or purchase inexpensively through your local hobby shop or online at places
like Amazon. I've got links to these below. If you think your balance lead is uncomfortably short,
you can go ahead and get these balance lead extensions as well. I don't think I'm going to
need this for charging this particular battery so I'm gonna connect my XT60 to XT30 adapter,
plug in the main lead, then the balance lead (you want your
negative on the left side-it only goes in one way I believe).
Then, once we've selected our battery type (which in our case is LiHV for the high voltage battery),
our number of cells (which is 4S), and our charge current, which we said we wanted
between 1C and 2C so let's go ahead and do some public math. 1 times 650 would be 650, 2C
would be 1300 milliamps (or 1.3 amps). So, let's just go somewhere between at 1 amp.
Then we scroll down to Start, press Enter, and we get a new screen. Press OK.
Up at this top bar here you'll see input voltage, the accumulated power consumption (and this will
increase over time as it's charging), and the internal temperature of the charger. Remember the
fan is gonna kick on at half-speed at 45 degrees Celsius and full speed above 53 degrees Celsius.
At this next level down you'll see the main port (at the XT60 connecter) voltage and current along
with the charging elapsed time and the charging capacity. You can use this number when finished
to calibrate your current meter on your drone. We scroll over and down here at the last level,
you'll see your individual cell voltages and how they're being charged (as indicated by
the highlighted numbers when they're charging) along with the total voltage measured at the
balance lead port. So, this one's your balance lead voltage and this one's your main port
voltage. Hopefully these two are about the same! While it's charging, you can scroll over once
again to see the internal resistances of your battery's individual cells.
These should all be approximately the same. If you have one significantly higher than the others,
that means that particular cell is either bad or going bad and you probably want to start thinking
about replacing the battery. Continuing to charge and use a battery with a bad cell
is not a good idea and can make bad things happen.
You can stop charging at any time by pressing the scroll wheel down,
and pressing Stop. In fact, one of the many functions
of this ToolkitRC M9 multi-functional charger is you can check the battery's cells internal
resistances first without charging it. Simply long press the EXIT button.
Here you get another series of menus for the many functions of this charger.
We'll select Measure Resistance and it'll do an internal resistance check
then display the results for you. Remember, we're not charging. That's pretty cool!
If you long press on the scroll wheel, you enter the Systems Settings menu.
I'll just scroll through these first two to show you what's available, but I will show you
a couple features under Personalization. So, we'll scroll through Input Settings
and these are the various options that you have to available to you to change. Security settings.
Let's go down to Personalization then. Under Personalization you can change
the intensity of your backlight
(on a scale from 1 to 10), the volumes for operation, announcements, and warnings
(from low, medium and high for each one), and you can even enter Dark Mode which is
what I've got displayed here or turn it to Light. I'll go back to Dark.
The M9 has lots of features, but let me show you how easy it is to
customize your start-up image and audio files. First, let's customize our start-up image.
Just grab any image you want. The M9 charger supports a max image size of
320x240 in BMP file format. The app I use is Resizeimage.net. Upload the image you want.
Change your pixel size to 320x240. Here if you notice that you type in 240
and your other dimension exceeds the max pixel size for the M9 charger, just make sure the
highest number you have for your dimension is within the M9 charger's max image size.
So, instead of 240 here, we're gonna go back here to 320. So, our image is going to be
320 x 180 instead of 320 x 240, no worries! Then, select BMP down here. Then resize image
and you can view if you'd like, then download your image. Copy it over to your M9 charger's SD card,
which I have over here on my E drive.
Then, to keep the original start-up image as a backup (it's filename is logo.bmp) you want to
change its filename from logo to something like logo_OLD. Then, change your new filename to logo.
Replace your SD card into your M9 charger and start it up. You now have a new start-up image.
Let's see how we can customize an audio file. Record whatever you want using your favorite
audio recorder. I use OBS Studio myself. You can record a song, your voice, or a voice from
a text to speech app like TTSDEMO. The ToolktRC M9 smart charger supports audio files in WAV
format only and as a Mono file. So, you'll need to convert your newly recorded sound file
to Mono and WAV format. There may be an easier way to do this (if you know of one,
let us all know in the comments below), but this way is pretty straight forward. I'm going to show
you how to edit your audio file and convert it also. I use Audacity (a free program linked below)
to edit it. Audacity requires specific formats, so if your audio file isn't in one of those formats,
you'll need to get it in an MP3 format or another format that Audacity does support
using another app. If you've recorded video with your audio, to convert that type of file,
I use an app called "Any video converter" (or AVC) to make that conversion to MP3.
Upload your audio file to Audacity.
Edit the audio file by clipping off the front and back if you need to,
adjust the volume if necessary,
and any other edits you want to do. Then you need to go to Tracks, Mix, Mix stereo down to Mono.
Project Rate down here in the left-hand corner 32K. File, Export. Export as WAV. 16 bit PCM.
Pick a folder you want to save it to. Save, Clear, OK. Then find your file. Copy & save it
to your ToolkitRC M9 Charger's SD card under the Sounds folder (in my case, English).
Then, just as we did while customizing our image, rename the old Bootup file which is the audio file
it plays on start-up (or whatever file you're replacing) to a different name (we'll save ours as
Bootup_OLD.WAV). Then, name out new file the same as the original filename we're replacing.
In this case, the file we're replacing was named Bootup.
Put the SD card back in the M9 charger. Start it up!
Now, I'll quickly go over how you can safely parallel charge with your M9
ToolkitRC Balance Charger. Here's where I'm going to
use a separate 240 watt power supply. You'll need a good parallel charging
plate like this one by Power Genius with fuses. This one has 3. The thing I like
about this one is it has both XT60 and XT30 connecters and its fairly inexpensive too.
You want to connect the main and balance leads
from the charging plate to the ToolkitRC M9 charger. You'll need an XT60 male to female
adapter lead you can make yourself or grab it online through a link below.
Make sure the batteries you're charging are of the same number of cells
and their individual cell voltages are within about 0.1 volts of each other
(or for a 4-cell LiPo, within about 0.4 volts total of each other).
So, here I've got 3 GNB 4S 1100 milliamp hour high voltage LiHV batteries.
I'll check their voltages to make sure they're within 0.4 volts of each other.
15.2.
15.3. So, yes, they're all within about 0.4 volts of each other.
So, we'll connect all 3 of these to the parallel charging plate
using both their main and balance leads. So, first we're gonna power up the ToolkitRM9 charger.
Then we're going to connect all 3 of these to the parallel charging plate
using both their main and balance leads.
Then, we just setup our charging on the M9 charger the way we did before.
We select LiHV (since they're high voltage batteries), 4 cells.
Now, for our current, when you parallel charge, you add up the capacities of all the batteries.
So, we have 3 1100 mah batteries. Adding up all of their capacities we get 3300 milliamps
or 3.3 amps. So, because we want to charge at a 1C to 2C charge rate,
we want to select our current as anywhere from 3.3 amps to 6.6 amps. Our power supply is good
up to 240 watts so we should be able to charge at that rate. So, let's change this to 6.6 amps.
Let's give it a shot! Seems to be working nicely!
Remember, never leave your charging batteries unattended, stick them in a LiPo Safe bag or
other fireproof enclosure, and it's always a good idea to have at least a Class C fire extinguisher
available for use if you need it. That's gonna do it for today.
Remember to Like the video and subscribe for more FPV fun stuff!
Thanks for you time and I'll catch you next video. Clear skies friend!