Sooooo… I was too exited to use our fresh Magni robot that I forgot the basics on the charger : put it on the right 230V european voltage, which resulted on a magnificent flash and smoke…
So first of all, take care to select the right voltage depending on the country (yes it’s written in the charger doc, but who reads it… )
Do you have the reference to the charger ?
I managed to find spare components for the fried ones, except for R6 and R20 resistors.
Is there somebody kind enough to open its charger and give me the values ?
One thing to bear in mind is that the charging port is the same as those used on many ezip scooters and wheelchairs. You can readily purchase chargers for these for example.
The charger supplied is a pretty beefy one - 5A so you get really fast charging. If you purchase alternative ones they may or may not be as fast.
Off the shelf chargers will almost certainly charge up the robot however the combination of the charger plugged in to the robot might or might not meet electromagnetic emissions standards, or other statutory standards.
same story here.
except that i did read the manual first.
it says “check that your electric supply is either 110v or 230v, then plug it on wall socket”
It never talks about a weird configuration switch that you have to touch prior to connecting a wall socket
anyway, on R6 i read “2R20”./ same for R20.
from the look of them, i fried the two big capacitators. I did order two new ones matching whatever’s written on them. but i have no clue about what else might be broken.
How did you find out what was broken? (except from the fact that they look ugly/smoked)
I worked around the problem of charging batteries because i ordered more than 1 magni so i have “spare” charger.
@davecrawley => thanks for the reference. I would rather purchase an “original” charger. Would you have such a reference?
@alexis I can get you an original charger. They are about US$23 + shipping each I believe, although if you get it from us you’ll probably wind up spending more on shipping than you will on the charger. Perhaps I should get some help with my supply chain - I’ve heard Ingram Micro operates some pretty good warehouses in Europe
As a side note, I will likely be qualifying a new charger, it is now obvious to me that we should ship out chargers that auto-switch voltage. If you want a charger now then email me and I will arrange it. If you want to wait until the new charger is qualified (possibly a couple of months) then let me know and I’ll email you once they are ready.
I bought the charger you linked on Amazon.
Works fine with 230V, and charging as expected.
The European cable was not included though, but it’s easy to find. It’s called “C5 power cable”.
Plus, with 0.6 A, it’s < 0.1C for a 7Ah battery, which is recommended for lead batteries.
could you recommend a higher current charger? eg. 8A
if I have 35Ah battery, it will take 8 hours to charge it. the max charging current in the battery spec is 9.9A
Well with a 35Ah battery you’ll struggle to even half discharge it in most scenarios. I’d suggest you just give the standard charger a try. If you run the robot for a standard 8 hour day it will probably only 20-30% discharge the battery so if you charge it in the evening the robot will reach full charge in 1 or 2 hours.
Technically we can’t recommend anything but the standard charger - as the robot has been certified as safe, for that device and absolutely plugging in a charger that is double what the robot has been certified for is a warranty voiding event.
That said however if you just want to charge up batteries of the type we recommend there are a large number of suitable devices out there - consider a search along the lines of “24V 10A Lead acid battery charger” - you will find a plethora of options.
Funny thing…I had just the opposite problem…my charger was set to 230V and I plugged it into 120V…it acted like a trickle charger and very, very, very slowly charged my batteries. The fan did not run and LED 2 was not Red, so that should have been a clue.
The charger manual is not clear…and the switch is not clear…am I in 230V when I can see the words 230V or will it be 230V mode when I push the switch to that direction? This is a common GUI problem (especially with pushbuttons)…does the indicator tell me what the current setting is or does it tell me to switch to that direction to get that setting?
As it turns out…if you can see the words 230V then you are in 230V mode. If you can see the words 120V, then you are in 120V mode.
Yes, this is a years-old thread…and yes I mean to post here so others can benefit. I’ve never understood why we shouldn’t post on old threads. People searching for answers don’t care when the thread was created vs when useful info was last added.
We try to warn folks but as would be expected many folks are excited and I like them don’t like to be spending a lot of time reading manuals. I hope our current documents are as good as they can be.
Maybe we should beef up our warnings. The factory is supposed to set voltage for where it ships to but sadly that is a ‘human’ operation and can be forgotten it seems.
To address you point on not digging up old threads, this is a case where it is perfectly fine (preferable even!) to have replied to this.
In general the problem is when people don’t read the threads carefully and their post isn’t relevant at all to the thread topic, or so much has changed since the last post (ex: a major redesign, or API change) that continuing to discuss the old stuff doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, you found the right place to post this. Thanks for the good info!
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