Many of us will own a lithium-ion power pack or two, usually a brick containing a few 18650 cylindrical cells and a 5 V converter for USB charging a cellphone. They’re an extremely useful item to have in your carry-around, for a bit of extra battery life when your day’s Hackaday reading has provided a worthy use for most of your charge. These pack are though by their very nature inflexible, no matter how many cells you own, the pack will only ever contain the number with which it was shipped. Worse, when those cells are discharged or even reach the end of their lives, they can’t be swapped for fresh ones. [Isaacporras] has a solution for these problems which he calls the Power Stacker, a modular battery pack system.
At its heart is the Maxim MAX8903 lithium-ion charge controller chip, of which one is provided for each cell. A single cell and MAX8903 with a DC to DC converter for 5 V output makes for the simplest configuration, and he has a backplane allowing multiple boards to be connected and sharing the same charge and output buses.
An infinitely configurable battery bank sounds great. It’s looking for crowdfunding backing, and for that it has an explanatory video which you can see below. Meanwhile if you’d like to try for yourself you can find the necessary files on the hackaday.io page linked above.
Source:: Hackaday