Capacitor smoothing question

Author	Message
lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United States Posts: 3778	Posted: 01:48pm 10 Mar 2025         Volhout said   A 18650 is a huge capacitor itself. There is no-way you can add a smoothing capacitor parallel to it so a pulsed current load (pulsing LED) changes into a constant current load Ah--thank you. This is where my ignorance of fundamentals shows through. I'll await the arrival tomorrow of the adjustable load USB module. It should be far more accurate than what I was attempting with a capacitor. Since the 18650s I have are all vastly over-claimed with respect to capacity, I guess there's no way other than trial and error to find out what the C/20 discharge rate is--run the setup repeatedly with different resistance settings until it is detected that the battery module has shut off after 20 hours. I'm not looking for constant current--I'm looking for the discharge rate at which the battery/module lasts for 20 hours. Then the reading on the current monitor of mWh will give me what the battery should be rated at.