This probably isn’t going to be of much interest to regular readers of this blog. But for the sake of those googlers and rc enthusiasts who found their way here I thought I would share a method to power your 12 volt battery charger indoors.
I decided to upgrade my plane a bit (a HobbyZone Super Cub) by moving from NiMH to LiPo batteries. Before the batteries arrive however, I needed to buy a new charger. Due to the inherent volatility of LiPo batteries I wanted to be sure I got one of the safest chargers available. After some shopping around I settled on the CellPro 4S.
It seems like any high-end battery similar to this one uses alligator clips and requires a 12 volt power source (i.e., car battery) to work. Seeing as how I didn’t like the idea of always charging under the hood, I looked for other solutions.
Inspired by a thread outlining the use of laptop ac to dc converters for doing so, I constructed this beast:
As you can see it’s just the DC Converter (which you can find an Ebay link to in the thread above), two bolts, 4 washers, 2 ring terminals, 2 nuts and a piece of wood for stabilization.
I also cut a small hole in the toolbox to feed the plug to the wall. When not in use it’s easy to push it back in. …that’s it, not much to it.
Thanks to ‘bpd282′ (on page 2 of the thread) for the idea of converting a tool box to house the electronics. It’s funny how similar my box turned out to his.
Guess all I need now are some batteries.
4 Comments
How exactly do you connect the power adapter to the terminals? I got a power supply from work today, brought it home, and snipped the end off expecting two wires. It’s just a white wire surrounded by more copper wire. From the pic it looks like you tapped the outside wires to the negative and added some other kind of extension to the positive. I’d really appreciate the help!
Hey Jeremy, yeah it is kind of hard to see how it came together in the picture. Keep in mind I’m no electronics geek so there’s probably an easier way of doing this… You’ll notice on the power supply where it mentions the voltage and amps that there is a small diagram usually looking like a large “C” with a dot in the middle and positive/negative symbols nearby. This tells you if the wire in the center is the positive wire or not. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reverse polarity on one of these things so your center wire most likely carries the positive charge.
I peeled the outer most plastic back about 6″ to reveal the 2 wires and then I gathered the outside wires together and tapped them like you said. The inside wire requires you to strip away the white plastic covering which I then wanted to tap but I had the wrong sized ring nuts so that’s why you see the extra green wire acting as a go-between. I hope this helps!
Thanks, Jason! I finished by “BeeBox” today thanks to your input.
Glad to help! It looks very nicely done! Here is the link to the pics if anyone else is interested
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[...] Well, as mentioned before, I decided to order some LiPo batteries for my rc plane - Hobbyzone’s Super Cub. I’ve heard good things about the Cub-LiPo combination so I ordered some batteries that I can use in my next plane as well. [...]