Comment on My charger wouldn't fit D-batteries, so I made an adapter. Printables link, with F3D file, inside
remotelove@lemmy.ca 10 months agoYou really don’t know the risks unless you open it and minimally reverse engineer it. The charger shouldn’t be very complicated and it’s not directly connected to mains so that is nice. Charging chips are super simple and there are not too many ways to screw those up, unless they do.
If anything at all is shady, it’ll be the power brick or the way the USB plug is powered. If the brick is crap and somehow starts passing mains, I am willing to bet that the USB plug will pass the bulk of the current through you or whatever is connected to it. It’s something to check, anyway.
Soap10116@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Reverse engineering to determine safety is what UL does.
remotelove@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
(I can’t disagree with you, cause you ain’t wrong. ;) I do probably need to clarify my point though.)
That is exactly my point about the device not being UL rated. More than once, I have needed to add or replace poor ground connections to the chassis of some device, when applicable. If there is a failure point, it’s usually where there were cost savings involved and generally not the charging circuit itself.
Most battery charging ICs have decent fail-safes for bad batteries. It’s just economical to use the same, or similar, generic IC across hundreds of products. (The TP4056 (and clones) is a decent example of wide adoption, but it’s not quite a 1:1 with this particular application.)
Again, it’s just something to look for when inspecting rando devices. To your point, cloned charge regulators may have deleted safeties, so that is a thing.