Portable Battery Charge for Phantom

[hughsnews]

Hi All,
I have a phantom 2 and will be slowly buying more batteries for it but $ is an issue- are there any brands other than DJI? However, as I am planning on taking my phantom into the field for my archaeological work, I need to be conscious of weight.

I was just curious if anyone has had luck with a portable charger or solar panel to help recharge batteries. I understand it would probably take longer than the hour from the wall charger, but I am often in the field for 7-8 hours so even if it took 3-4 hours a charge, I would still get to use it.

Any advice would be awesome.

 

[reALIGNed]

almost all aftermarket lipo chargers will hook directly to a car battery, or you can use an ac inverter hooked to your car battery to use your original charger.

 

[Don the builder]

I purchase a "Black & Decker" brand from my local Home Depot (construction supply store) for about $40. USD and works great. Takes the same amount of time (just at 2 hours) to charge as in my home. I believe it is a 400 Watt inverter. Used it about 10 times so far in the past 2 weeks.

 

[hughsnews]

I purchase a "Black & Decker" brand from my local Home Depot (construction supply store) for about $40. USD and works great. Takes the same amount of time (just at 2 hours) to charge as in my home. I believe it is a 400 Watt inverter. Used it about 10 times so far in the past 2 weeks.

Is there any chance you know the name of the product?

My only issue is that I can't use car batteries etc. I work on sites where we are a huge walk away from the car. We carry everything in with us and then take it back that night. I don't mind carrying things as long as I know it'll function.

Thanks for the advice!

 

[Ksc]

They sell portable battery systems. I had one for my macbook. It would charge it from dead about 5 or 6 times before needing to be recharged itself. I want to say it was called a hyper juice. You may be able to get one to charge your batteries on the go if you happen to be in an area where no other power supply is available.

 

[WReimer]

As far as portable charging systems go, they're a dime a dozen; solar powered, battery driven, etc. A quick Google search should yield many options.

The problem you're going to run into is that even the Phantom battery, while not terribly high capacity as thing R/C can be, are energy dense; it takes a lot of power to charge one up.

A solar charger is unlikely to fully charge a Phantom battery fully in an 8 hour day; they aren't terribly efficient, although much mores than they used to be. The most likely way of charging the battery in a reasonable amount of time is with a car battery, which isn't very practical to haul around. Also, nothing is going to be cheap.

a 2200mah battery isn't expensive; the $100 you may spend on a solar charger or something similar will buy you 2 or 3 (or more?) Phantom batteries anyway, so why not go that route right out of the gate?

You can stick 3 or 4 of them in a pocket and spend all of your break time flying...or at least enough of your break time that your supervisor on site may start to question the "flying vs. Working" ratio.

At the end of the day, I'm betting that carrying your Phantom, transmitter, spare batteries, a couple of minimalist tools, props etc along with work tools and equipment a significant distance from your vehicle gets old, real fast. You may like the idea of having the Phantom there to fly at various times of the day more appealing than the reality of having it there. It may not be worth spending a lot of time on if you're going to get tired of hauling it around a few kilometres each day.

 

[hughsnews]

As far as portable charging systems go, they're a dime a dozen; solar powered, battery driven, etc. A quick Google search should yield many options.

The problem you're going to run into is that even the Phantom battery, while not terribly high capacity as thing R/C can be, are energy dense; it takes a lot of power to charge one up.

A solar charger is unlikely to fully charge a Phantom battery fully in an 8 hour day; they aren't terribly efficient, although much mores than they used to be. The most likely way of charging the battery in a reasonable amount of time is with a car battery, which isn't very practical to haul around. Also, nothing is going to be cheap.

a 2200mah battery isn't expensive; the $100 you may spend on a solar charger or something similar will buy you 2 or 3 (or more?) Phantom batteries anyway, so why not go that route right out of the gate?

You can stick 3 or 4 of them in a pocket and spend all of your break time flying...or at least enough of your break time that your supervisor on site may start to question the "flying vs. Working" ratio.

At the end of the day, I'm betting that carrying your Phantom, transmitter, spare batteries, a couple of minimalist tools, props etc along with work tools and equipment a significant distance from your vehicle gets old, real fast. You may like the idea of having the Phantom there to fly at various times of the day more appealing than the reality of having it there. It may not be worth spending a lot of time on if you're going to get tired of hauling it around a few kilometres each day.

That is true. My only issue is that the Phantom 2 batteries are like 300$ or so and money for me is relatively tight, especially as I just bought everything. But this is a really valid point. I suppose I thought if there was a small charger out there like the one mentioned above, it might save a little bit of weight as I have to fly my gear overseas a bit, but perhaps its a matter of slowly buying batteries. I think the Phantom had other batters made that were not JDI, so perhaps Phantom 2 might have one soon....