The Brand New Canon Battery that would not charge!!!

 I purchased a new R7 body a few days ago, it seems Vistek requires you to pay for the produce at the store before you can open the package... Sucks...

Side bar note... likely not going back there...

Regardless, I paid for it, opened the box, we had 7D with us for comparison, and when the new battery refused to start the new R7, I put the battery from the 7D into the R7 and all was good with the body.

When we got home I put the new battery in the new supplied charger and let it sit on charge for half an hour.  Put the battery in the R7 and... NOTHING, same as if I had no battery in.

I have seen this issue before.  The Canon LC-E6 chargers require communications to the internal chip in the battery to determine charge level.  But.. the chip require enough battery power to run.  So, too dead of a battery, no way to charge.

I used fine volt meter probes to measure the battery and it was way less than 7.2 volts... way below the nominal 8.4 volts.  I attached the battery via. the some fine probes to a lab. power supply set to limit current to 300mA. A minute or so of this and the battery voltage was at 7.3 volts, so it was taking a charge.

Now into the draw and find the simple minded USB battery charger for the LP-E6 type batteries that does not make use of internal sensors, just simple external voltage measurement.   After 10 minutes on this charger I put the battery into the camera and... YES it powered up, showed 32% charge.

Put battery into the LC-E6 charger and left it for a while.  After some time I put battery back into camera and it showed an increase in charge.

Left battery in charger for a couple of hours and it reached full charge.  Seems just fine.

The bottom line

It appears a cell or two had fully discharged shutting down the internal charge tracking chip

The chip last though it was at about 30%

Some times the cheap chargers win.  The one I used to recover the battery which is powered via. an usb cable is kept in the camera bag to allow me to charge a battery while in the car.


 The simple minded Charger that saved the day

Note that it has only two contact for the battery.

To the right the new LP-E6NH that would not charge


Note that there are 4 contacts.  2 are exposed and two are hidden to avoid accidental contact.  The hidden ones are the battery's terminals.  The exposed one are for charging control


If you look at the Canon charger there are 4 contacts.  matching the battery.  Problem is it used the contacts that talk to the battery charge control chip to operate the charger. 

This is how it knows to flash the light in the various patterns for the charge level

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