Well, got it working. I had been trying to do it on the charger base and added leads to the charge base inside the controller leading to 2 posts that I could aligator clip to the charger. Every time I tried that I got the open circuit error. Next I tried a fake charge base that was 2 springs that I could clip onto and velcroing the car down to give constant pressure on the springs... That had the same problem.
My working effort is a small single cell charge tray I made from some aluminum sheet, a rubber grommet and some nuts + bolts. Works excellently. Pic shows at 110mAh charged and its now at 150mAh input and 3.25V. I manually stopped it when it hit 161mAh and 3.26V, perhaps the 8mV delta peak detection setting is too high for such a small battery?
Since the tray is adjustable, I might use it to cycle 2/3A cells too
So can anyone think of a reason it wouldn't work the 2 first ways I tried to charge the battery?