The increasing dominance of lithium cells in the market place leave our trusty NiMH cells in a rough spot. Sure, you can still get a chargers for the AAs in your life, but it’s old tech and not particularly stylish. That’s where [Maximilian Kern] comes in, whose SPINC project was recently featured in IEEE Spectrum— so you know it has to be good.With the high-resolution LED, the styling of this device reminds us a little bit of the Pi-Mac-Nano— and anything that makes you think of a classic Macintosh gets automatic style points. There’s something reminiscent of an ammunition clip in the way batteries are fed into the top and let out the bottom of the machine.[Maximilian] thought of the, ah, less-detail-oriented amongst us with this one, as the dedicated charging IC he chose (why reinvent the wheel?) is connected to an H-bridge to allow the charger to be agnostic as to orientation. That’s a nice touch. An internal servo grabs each battery in turn to stick into the charging circuit, and deposits it into the bottom of the device once it is charged. The LCD screen lets you monitor the status of the battery as it charges, while doubling as a handy desk clock (that’s where the RP2040 comes in). It is, of course, powered by USB-C-PD as all things are these days. Fast-charging upto 1A is enabled, but you might want to go slower to keep your cells lasting as long as possible. Firmware, gerbers and STLs are available on GitHub under a GPL-3.0 license– so if you’re still using NiCads or want to bring this design into the glorious lithium future, you can consider yourself welcome to.We recently featured a AA rundown, and for now, it looks like NiMH is still the best bang for your buck, which means this project will remain relevant for a few years yet. Of course, we didn’t expect the IEEE to steer us wrong.Thanks to [George Graves] for the tip.