We have extended the extension cable to 20 feet and are now finding the  resulting voltage drop is causing camera to turn on for 10 seconds then shuts off for 5 and this repeats itself.

I know we are losing voltage and amps due to the longer cable. What we want to know is what is the Maximum voltage and amperage the camera can handle. I am not asking what the batterries are I know they are around 12.5 volts on a full charge. I am hoping someone from Osmo DJI could tell me what the camera draws and how much above 12.5 volts the camera can handle??

We think we are very close to solving our issue but are about half a volt shy but do not want to fry the camera by increasing our voltage even up to say 13 volts.

Any electrical engineers out there? I have looked every where to see what the power rating is on the camera .NOT THE BATTERRIES!!!

The cable we extended is the one that goes between the camera and the handle. We are operating it from the end of a jib arm so camera is about 20 feet away from handle.

Hey Presto.  We have all the parts to do our 20' extender but haven't actually soldered it together yet.  What we were contemplating doing is soldering female HDMIs onto either end of the stock DJI extender and then using a regular HDMI male to male to bridge the two in the middle.  That would allow us to test the various lengths 5' to 25' to find max length without having to resolder everything.  We were also thinking that we might be able to use an off the shelf powered HMDI extender to boost the signal over the extension length but had the exact same concern about bricking the camera.  

I would love to get the pin diagram for what signal goes down what pin on that 20-pin camera-to-handle connector.  Our thought is to build a breakout box that extracts the video signal and record that separately (assuming the camera sends a signal to the handle for wifi transmission).  That would get around the 14min 1080/30 record time limit.  I've been looking for specs and/or wiring diagrams everywhere and found nothing helpful.  Obviously we're "off the reservation" here.

FYI - I contacted the folks at Kamerar that make to 80" extension and they said 80" was the max length.  They said too much voltage drop after that.

dr.nick Posted at 2017-2-20 11:37
Hey Presto.  We have all the parts to do our 20' extender but haven't actually soldered it together yet.  What we were contemplating doing is soldering female HDMIs onto either end of the stock DJI extender and then using a regular HDMI male to male to bridge the two in the middle.  That would allow us to test the various lengths 5' to 25' to find max length without having to resolder everything.  We were also thinking that we might be able to use an off the shelf powered HMDI extender to boost the signal over the extension length but had the exact same concern about bricking the camera.  

I would love to get the pin diagram for what signal goes down what pin on that 20-pin camera-to-handle connector.  Our thought is to build a breakout box that extracts the video signal and record that separately (assuming the camera sends a signal to the handle for wifi transmission).  That would get around the 14min 1080/30 record time limit.  I've been looking for specs and/or wiring diagrams everywhere and found nothing helpful.  Obviously we're "off the reservation" here.

Hi Dr Nick a few comments that MAY help and also a few questions. First off we suffered the same pain as you looking for some Specs and or diagrams. Amazed that they do not exist or that someone from DJI on this forum can not answer the question.
We originally joined 2 of the 60 inch cables and it works at 10 feet. We did that with out any alternation and just used the existing connectors that are on the ends of the cables to join them. So we added a third to the mix giving us about 15 feet. At that point the camera would not stay on consistently . But was very close to normal operation. At that point we thought some of the voltage drop we were getting was due to cable length AND THE ADAPTORS the current was going through. It was at that point we used just one cable and put 15 feet of HDMI cable between it giving us 20 feet total and only an adaptor at each end (handle and camera). Unfortunately we have the voltage drop issue as described in my first post on this thread. Keep in mind we were using an external larger battery an Anton Bauer Dionic 90 which is higher voltage and amperage than the Osmo battery. BUT we sent it through the Osmo battery extender box which HAS A VOLTAGE REGULATOR BUILT IN that drops voltage down to around 11.5 volts. Its this voltage regulator that is now the culprit as it is dropping it too much when considering the resistance that is also added in the longer cable. So we are on the verge of trying the same larger battery with out the voltage regulator but not at a full charge either .Closer  to the 12.5 volts which is  about what a fully charged Osmo battery sits at. Our fear is not Volts but amps bricking the camera. You have any thoughts on that???? The Antons are rated at 6.3 amps so higher than the Osmo batteries. So with the loss in the 20 foot line we are hoping it will work. We COULD sauder in our own variable voltage regulator(allowing us to adjust the voltage up or down) but we were hoping to avoid that labour if not needed. So it brings us back to how much can the camera take! I welcome anyones thoughts on this. I know some technician somewhere MUST know the schematics of that camera. I tried a "live chat" with an Osmo rep and it was painful and led no where!

dr.nick Posted at 2017-2-20 11:37
Hey Presto.  We have all the parts to do our 20' extender but haven't actually soldered it together yet.  What we were contemplating doing is soldering female HDMIs onto either end of the stock DJI extender and then using a regular HDMI male to male to bridge the two in the middle.  That would allow us to test the various lengths 5' to 25' to find max length without having to resolder everything.  We were also thinking that we might be able to use an off the shelf powered HMDI extender to boost the signal over the extension length but had the exact same concern about bricking the camera.  

I would love to get the pin diagram for what signal goes down what pin on that 20-pin camera-to-handle connector.  Our thought is to build a breakout box that extracts the video signal and record that separately (assuming the camera sends a signal to the handle for wifi transmission).  That would get around the 14min 1080/30 record time limit.  I've been looking for specs and/or wiring diagrams everywhere and found nothing helpful.  Obviously we're "off the reservation" here.

BY the way Dr Nick although there are 20 pins in the adaptor only one side is used so only 10 wires very small ones but only 10 so it would make your trouble shooting for the video lines easier. And yes we are 95% sure the video runs down one of those line to the handle where it is then sent to wifi

Thanks Presto.  Just curious.  If you run the full-length setup off a normal fully charged battery what happens?  I assume the same thing?

I'm no electrical engineer so take my advice with a grain of salt but the additional danger of bypassing the handle is that while you know what's going into the handle, you don't know what the handle is outputting. Handle is obviously siphoning off some power to run the wifi transmission and I would think it'd all run off the same voltage but I seem to remember seeing something somewhere about the handle outputting 8v but I'm not positive about that.

For calculating handle output (and maybe you've already been down this path) here's what I would do.  Unmount the gimbal, put in a freshly fully charged battery in the handle, and then power on.  Find the pins that're sending the power down the line and put a volt meter on it.  That should give you a safe number for the voltage "ceiling".  For amperage I think you'll need to connect the gimbal via one of your extenders in a way that you can get at the wires.  Find the wire for that power pin (hot or neutral doesn't matter which) and put an amp meter in line to see what it's pulling.  That number may fluctuate depending on what the gimbal and camera are doing so you'll want to pan/tilt/zoom at the same time while forcing the gimbals to stabilize to get that max pull number.  

We're a week or so away from having time to jump into this so really appreciate you blazing the trail and sharing your progress.  It's hugely helpful.

dr.nick Posted at 2017-2-20 16:18
Thanks Presto.  Just curious.  If you run the full-length setup off a normal fully charged battery what happens?  I assume the same thing?

I'm no electrical engineer so take my advice with a grain of salt but the additional danger of bypassing the handle is that while you know what's going into the handle, you don't know what the handle is outputting. Handle is obviously siphoning off some power to run the wifi transmission and I would think it'd all run off the same voltage but I seem to remember seeing something somewhere about the handle outputting 8v but I'm not positive about that.

No I think you misunderstood we are not by passing the handle we are just by passing the Volt regulator that is built into the battery extender that is inserted in the handle. If you are not familiar it looks just like a battery but is hollow (Other than the regulator thats inside it) but has external wires that connect to our large battery . All we are doing to by pass the regulator is removing it from the dummy battery but our power still goes through the handle first as it must to power it. Make sense? IN other words we are just using a dummy shell of a battery to aid us in making power contact way up inside the handle.
To your first question about full length set up. Yes we tried it with an Osmo battery fully charged and it does not work. We think we are about a volt or less shy for power so its a fine line between it working and overloading the camera. Yes tests for amperage is a path we may take and have discussed thanks for you input will keep you posted. I am shooting in The US this week and will tackle this when we return.

That totally makes sense.

For what it's worth to add to the discussion, I use two of the gimbal extenders daisy chained together frequently and they work fine, I have not had any of these issues.

Actually, I use it with the Osmo Pro and the X5 camera.  The gimbal extender doesn't officially "fit" that camera, and the locking ring is too tall so I had to remove the locking ring and grind it down to fit (just like people were doing with the Z-Axis arm to use with the X5 before DJI made one specifically for it).

I will say that I could NOT use the longer Kamerar cable daisy-chained with a DJI one.  I tried that because it was a bit longer (and cheaper) than the OEM cable from DJI, but it did not work.  It would power up the camera fine, but the camera would go crazy and violently shudder and flop around in the gimbal.  However, two DJI cables chained together work fine.

I had been temped to cut and splice a cable to make a longer length just as was mentioned above... but I didn't know how many wires were in there (the thought of 20 hair-width wires scared me), and I didn't know the maximum length I could go.  Good to know there are 10 of them... I don't think I'd be up to soldering 20 wires, but 10 I could probably handle. BUT it sounds like I'm already operating at the maximum length that I can get anyway, without doing some kind of voltage-boosting voodoo.

Thanks for the info, good stuff.....

T2

FauxFilm Posted at 2017-5-18 11:35
For what it's worth to add to the discussion, I use two of the gimbal extenders daisy chained together frequently and they work fine, I have not had any of these issues.

Actually, I use it with the Osmo Pro and the X5 camera.  The gimbal extender doesn't officially "fit" that camera, and the locking ring is too tall so I had to remove the locking ring and grind it down to fit (just like people were doing with the Z-Axis arm to use with the X5 before DJI made one specifically for it).

Thanks for the two extenders joined tip, been looking for someone who had tried that

Had an exchange with the Kamerar folks and they confirmed the 60" was the furthest it could go.  Anything beyond that they said was unreliable.