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Portable Battery Chargers For The TB48 Inspire 1 Battery
3130 18 2016-1-15
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gordontrey
lvl.1

United States
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What do you think about this portable battery charger?
Will it allow me to sufficiently charge the TB48  Inspire 1 Battery if I am nowhere near wall outlet?
https://chargetech.com/product/portable-power-outlet/





Charge Tech

Charge Tech
2016-1-15
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TommyJeep
lvl.3
Flight distance : 50423 ft
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United States
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Uh, no.  It's 2700MaH.  The TB48 is 5700MaH.  This battery is way too small.
2016-1-15
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gordontrey
lvl.1

United States
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The charger is 27000Mah not 2700Mah.
2016-1-15
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TommyJeep
lvl.3
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gordontrey@iclo Posted at 2016-1-15 11:30
The charger is 27000Mah not 2700Mah.

Ah, I see it is.  Weird, it doesn't seem to be 5 times larger than a TB48
2016-1-15
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gordontrey
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TommyJeep Posted at 2016-1-15 21:58
Ah, I see it is.  Weird, it doesn't seem to be 5 times larger than a TB48

I don't think it is all battery. Its got the "smart battery" tech inside as well.
2016-1-16
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dopeytree
First Officer
Flight distance : 6716467 ft
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Nice! If only they did one for the UK..

I have been wondering about location charging / power.
Do you know how this compares to a car battery? in terms on capacity?
2016-1-16
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gordontrey
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dopeytree Posted at 2016-1-16 10:29
Nice! If only they did one for the UK..

I have been wondering about location charging / power.

I have no idea. I hope someone with battery output/input knowledge responds to this discussion.
2016-1-16
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pantera989
lvl.4

New Zealand
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From memory, the MaH can't be compared without knowing the voltage, eg an 1000MaH 5v battery and an 500MaH 10v battery have the same capacity.

I'm guessing that battery is 27,000 MaH, 5V and therefore at the 20 something volts of the inspire battery it's probably only 5-6k MaH at ~20V. To make it worse, if you are plugging your battery charger into the AC slot on that, you are losing a lot of power converting the DC from the battery, into AC current, then the DJI battery charger changing it back to DC again. Expect to loose at least 10% capacity at each of these steps (ever wonder why your charger gets warm?)
Something like this, although a lot larger, might be a bit better ( althoguh you are still going through the DC to AC and back to DC steps):

http://www.goalzero.com/p/165/goal-zero-yeti-400-solar-generator
2016-1-17
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Farnk666
Captain
Flight distance : 1711394 ft
Australia
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No, you are mixing up current and voltage there.

To charge an Inspire battery requires an input voltage in the order of 26v and available current of a few amps.
To accomplish this from an external, large battery (i.e. a car battery) requires that the battery 12V is increased either via an inverter to mains voltages so you can use your standard DJI charger, or with a specialised dc-dc 'booster' that will take 12Vdc and give you 26Vdc with sufficient current. I've searched for months for a good quality dc-dc 'booster', but am yet to find one that is suitable.

The rating of MaH is simply the number of milliamps that the battery can deliver for the period of one hour. 27,000MaH will give you 27 Amps for one hour at whatever voltage the battery is rated at. It doesn't change.

For my field work, I have a 55Ah gelpack battery (similar to this: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Deep- ... :g:tfwAAOSwnH1WZmAG) mounted in a plywood box with the usual cigarette lighter outlets. I plug a 600W pure sinewave inverter into this battery and can easily charge 2 TB48's while I'm flying. The battery lasts all day and I just charge it when I get back home. Easy.

2016-1-17
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SkyDen
lvl.3
Flight distance : 31152 ft
United States
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Given our industry/hobby of choice and the personalities it draws, do the logical thing and by a Toyota Tacoma so that you have a standard wall charger in the bed of the truck.  A simple $34000 portable battery charger.  All joking aside, it works well.
2016-1-18
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Hterag
Second Officer
Flight distance : 961978 ft
United Kingdom
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I wish manufacturers would stop focusing on the mAh in the promotional material... It's not particularly useful and, as has already been said, the available power depends on the voltage...

27Ah @ 5V = 135Wh
5.7Ah @ 22.8V = 129.96Wh

What this means is, technically, the pack has enough power in an ideal situation to charge one TB48 once, but changing voltages is pretty inefficient, with a specially made system you may just about get 90-95% efficiency (again, ideal world) but then you'd need (I just checked the output of the stock charger - 26.3V @ 3.83A) to get at least 22.16A out of that 5V pack when most of them are designed to put out around 1-2A...

I hope this goes some way to clarify the differences in battery capacity between devices.


EDIT: Wait, I may need to take some of that back, I didn't realise the pack had an AC output... Is that right? How efficient is that? Now I'm very curious because it suddenly became more viable...


EDIT2: According to the manual for the "18K" model, "At a 65W load, an operating time of 1 to 1.5 hours or more can be expected." Which means we could get to about 65% of the TB47 (100Wh) in one hour. If we assume the, "27K" model has 50% more power, then that might give us just enough for one charge of the TB47...

These numbers are with the, "1" of the, "1 to 1.5 hours" expected life, if it lasts 1.5 then it'd be enough for one charge of the TB48, too. Only concern I'd have at this point is whether it can output 100W continuously for an hour or so. If it can, it's a lot cheaper than the DJI batteries... As long as you don't mind the wait between flights.


EDIT3: So, according to the manual, it's able to output a maximum of 85W, that's not enough to charge using the standard DJI charger, unfortunately.
2016-1-18
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teamnest1
Second Officer
Flight distance : 18484 ft
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With all specs aside, has anyone actually tried it yet?
2016-1-18
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Mike-the-cat
Captain
Flight distance : 21621841 ft
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You'd be better off buying a spare TB48 and keeping that charged up.
2016-1-18
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pantera989
lvl.4

New Zealand
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Farnk666 Posted at 2016-1-17 20:48
No, you are mixing up current and voltage there.

To charge an Inspire battery requires an input vol ...

Yes, and when you change the voltage you change that.

An 10v battery with 1000mah -10v for 1 hour at 1 amp  (10Watts)
An 5v battery with 1000mah  -5v for 1 hour at 1 amp  (5 Watts)

If I take that 10v at 1 amp, and use a DC-DC converter to drop it to 5v, assuming it was 100% effcaint I would get 5v at 2amps for an hours (10 watts)

Knowing the voltage when using mah rating is essential for comparing.

An 1000mah 5v battery will not charge an 1000mah 10v battery to full, you would get half in a perfect workld, and a bit under half after the ineffcaincies of DC to DC (or even worse, DC to AC and back to DC again) converters.
2016-1-18
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pantera989
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pantera989@gmai Posted at 2016-1-19 09:45
Yes, and when you change the voltage you change that.

An 10v battery with 1000mah -10v for 1 hour  ...

Also for better results, assuming the DJI car charger isn't a piece of crap, getting a battery with a lighter socket should waste less energy, as assuming they are using a decent DC-DC converter in the Car charger, you are skipping the DC to AC and back to DC steps that using the mains charger plugged into a battery with an inverter has.
2016-1-18
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HermosaDrones
Second Officer
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i use a 150 watt and a 500 watt inverter when i can't use my 800 watt generator.  The inverters with the standard 100 watt dji charger and the 180 watt dji charger do a great job when i am driving to a new location.
2016-1-19
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gordontrey
lvl.1

United States
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So I just talked to ChargeTech and they said that this product (the one at the top of this thread) cannot sufficiently charge the TB48 batteries. BUT... they are coming out with a device similar in design an inch larger in length, width, and thickness. It will be called "Plug" and it will be able to power devices as large as a mini refrigerator. Plug will first be seen on kickstarter in a month and a half - around March 10-20, 2016.

The closest thing in comparison is definitely  http://www.goalzero.com/p/165/goal-zero-yeti-400-solar-generator - thank you pantera989
The new "Plug" device will just be a little smaller and able to put in a pelican case with the inspire.
2016-1-20
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gordontrey
lvl.1

United States
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I'll be getting two of these:
https://lifepower.be/product/a2-s-20800-mah-portable-outlet/

they can charge the T48s with the 100w charging cable!
2016-9-5
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Farnk666
Captain
Flight distance : 1711394 ft
Australia
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Finished setting out a 50 Amp auxiliary DC circuit in my vehicle to feed a pure sine wave inverter similar to this one.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Large ... :g:5VIAAOSwhQ5XQG17

While charging two TB48's (using a couple of the standard DJI 100 chargers) it's drawing over 15 amps!
Very happy to be able to charge a couple of batteries while on the move.
2016-9-7
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