I’ve been playing with an RC car lately. Today I tried upgrading my NiMH batteries to LiPo batteries and naively assumed the connectors would all be the same standard – nope. The batteries I bought are these:

  • Turnigy 2650mah 4S 20C 14.8v 4-cell
  • Turnigy 5000mah 2S 20C 7.4v 2-cell

Things I Learned

  1. Most toy cars come with NiMH batteries that use “mini tamiya” connectors. They look like this:

    Mini Tamiya Connector

  2. These connectors are not standard for LiPo batteries. More common is the XT60 connector (or its newer, backward-compatible version, XT60U).

    XT60

    XT60U

  3. Some bigger batteries have yet another kind of connector. For example, this is the HXT 4mm plug:

    HXT 4mm

  4. LiPo batteries are a huge fire risk. They consist of several battery cells strapped together with shitty plastic and need to be charged in a way that all the cells are balanced. So you’ll find that the batteries come with not one but TWO plugs. The little plug is a balancing plug. Now, the plug is a JST-XH plug but it’s even more confusing because these plugs can have varying numbers of pins. Here are some pictures:

    JST-XH 3-pin JST-XH 4-pin JST-XH 5-pin

I realized only after purchasing the batteries that I would need a special charger, and that I would have to buy a nicer one if I didn’t want to start a fire in my home. They’re not cheap. I bought the cheapest one I felt comfortable with (~$120) the SkyRC D100.