The accu cycler project presented here is an excellent solution for charging and discharging NiCd and NiMH accumulators for R/C modelers and others who make use of these accumulator types. With its performance it is very close to the many of the commercial products available on the market.
The 'power' part of the design is not a common choice in similar applications, having in mind of its size and energy dissipation, but it is very easy to understand its principles of operation even for beginners in electronics. The 'intelligent' part of the design communicates with PC using serial port providing additional process visualization. The process graph is saved to on-board EEPROM memory and it is possible to download the data to PC even when the charging/discharging process has finished.
