SUNLABZ Fast Battery Charger

Update: Posted a short demo on Youtube HERE.

When I travel, I take my old gameboy advance with me. It's light, entertaining, and isn't too valuable if it does happen to go missing or get damaged. Unfortunately, the gameboy takes two AA batteries. It was too early to have its successor's rechargeable battery pack. This means I have been going through a ton of batteries, and it's a shame because each pair is only good for about 5 hours on the gameboy. I decided to invest in rechargeable batteries after realizing how much waste was being generated in such a short time.

I looked around and decided to go with the SUNLABZ fast battery recharger with 8 slots. Outside of my computer mouse, remotes, and gameboy, I don't use too many batteries so I figured the 8 slot was good enough. Packaging looked very good considering the price I paid (25.00 USD), and even comes with a pamphlet to explain use.

The advertisement on Amazon doesn't clearly state whether it takes all AA or AAA batteries or if you can mix them, but you can. Each slot can hold either which is nice.

Something that also isn't explained in the advertisement or in the pamphlet is the 'Refresh' button on the right side. I decided to play with it and find out. When you insert a battery, the LCD will light up and show a status indicator on the far left. Usually it says 'CHG' for charging, but you can also use this module to discharge the batteries. As the pamphlet informs you, sometimes discharging and charging the batteries will improve their life and use. If you hold down the 'Refresh' button, you will see the status change from 'Charging' to 'Discharging' meaning it is draining the batteries. Holding down the 'Refresh' button will change the mode back to 'Charging.'

One more thing.

I have sensitive ears, and if you're like me, you always hated watching anything on those old tube style televisions because of the high frequency whining that they generated. This thing whines. It's not particularly loud, and I imagine people are not keeping these chargers in their bedroom or anything, but just know that it does whine. The pattern goes something like, "Eeeeeee, click, Eeeeeeee, click, etc." Just for those curious, I used a frequency analyzer application on my phone, and it looks to be around 14 KHz. Again, not terrible, just would have been good to know.

(Spike on right is the whine from charger)

Overall, awesome product so far. Takes a while to charge, but it beats wasting so many non-rechargeable batteries.