Hi all! I am new here and electrical is not my strong suit... I'm looking to add some off road LED light to my m600 pro for some night operations and missions. I have a couple in mind. One set is 12v and 72w and the other is 12v and 168w. I would like to power with Lipo batteries and at this time have no need to remotely switch them on and off ( i can just do that from the ground). I'm wondering what size of lipos and what other things ill be needing to complete this and whats the best way to do it.   I thank you all for your thoughts and opinions.

Hi,

For sure you could accomplish this fairly basically with some simple wiring between the LED lights and some 3S LiPo batteries. But you'll likely run into issues eventually if you do it the simple way.

12v 72wh equates to around 6,000mAh.
12v 168wh equates to around 14,000mAh.

I'd start with one 72wh for proof of concept. Going by the above, a 3S 5200 12C battery (using 4,000 mAh, ~80% of it's capacity) would give you 35-40 minutes of running time.

Hooking it up, at minimum I'd like to see an inline fuse, a 5200mAh 12C battery should be able to support a load of up to around 60A. But the 72w LED light shouldn't draw more than 6A, so I'd go for a 10-15A fuse. This will hopefully stop your battery from catching fire, puffing, etc if something goes wrong at the LED end.

The other thing you don't want to do is drain your LiPo too far, if you're not turning the LED light on or off remotely (it's constantly on) then you're at risk of doing this. A solution would be a low voltage cut-off, something that monitors the LiPo batteries voltage or consumption and triggers a relay to switch off the LED light at a certain level. This could cause issues with it being left in complete darkness, so alternatively have the monitor shut off the main LED earlier and turn on a lower power LED for a short time (a few minutes) to help with navigation and landing.

Once you have something working, you can increase the battery supply. Putting more of the same batteries in parallel will allow you to supply higher loads (change out that fuse to 30-40A), or run for longer duration.