High capacity batter for radio controlled helicopter

I have a radio control helicopter that has a 150 Mah battery.

Could I upgrade to this one for longer run times ?

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It would probably weigh a little more, but the motor is pretty strong.

Reply to
Andy K
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Can't tell from your info. Suggest you calculate the weight difference and hang that much extra on the copter and see how/if it flies before you spend the money.

Reply to
mike

The 150mAh battery is probably between 25% and 50% of the all-up helicopter mass, and is probably single cell.

The 1000mAh battery is probably two cell, which means that it'll weigh roughly 12 times as much as the single-cell 150mAh battery. That means that your helicopter all-up weight will go up by a factor of between three and six.

Assuming that doubling the voltage to the thing doesn't make it go up in flames, you probably won't get off the ground. But it would run longer.

Here's what you want to do:

Add ballast to your helicopter (pennies will do) at close to the center of gravity, and fly the thing. Keep adding ballast and flying until you don't like how the helicopter flies anymore. Figure out how much ballast you can add and still have decent flight characteristics.

Now weigh the ballast together with your battery, and figure out how many cells the battery has (probably one, but don't quote me on that). Get on the Hobby King web site (it'll be no more expensive than, and probably cheaper than, eBay), find a battery that weighs as much as your ballast plus your battery, has the same number of cells, and has a connector that's compatible with your heli. Buy a couple, along with a compatible charger, and go fly.

In the end, you may just find out that you have to add so much extra throttle in order to stay in the air that a bigger battery actually makes things worse -- but you'll only find out if you try.

Report back here -- it sounds like an interesting experiment.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

I did not double voltage, uses same 3.7 V.

Old battery 8 grams

Newer one 29 grams

29 g = 1 0z.

One ounce does not seem like much weight.

I found there's a 380 mAh battery that weighs 10g.

Reply to
Andy K

1 ounce isn't much to you or me, but how much is it for your helicopter? That's why I suggested that you do some test flying -- to find out. You could just get the battery and give it a whirl, being careful not to crash it due to marginal lift. However, if it doesn't work you're out the price of a battery -- so you can do testing first, and more effective spending later.

I don't know if you're in the US or elsewhere, but you can probably do a web search and quickly find out how much your local coins weigh (1983 and later US pennies are 2.5 grams, for instance). That gives you a handy weight standard that doesn't require you to have a scale.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

I went to the Hobby King web site.

Shipping is from Hong Kong.

It's is cheaper than Ebay, but will it take a month ?

Andy

Reply to
Andy K

You can specify which warehouse it needs to come out of -- I assume you're in the US, so specify whichever of the west-coast or east-coast ones is closer to you. Then it'll limit what it shows you to what's in that warehouse. I think they have a Europe warehouse, too, if you're in GB.

You can also go with Hobby Partz or any of the other low-cost outfits.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Weighing the entire helicopter on kitchen scales is also worthwhile. Then you have some idea of what fraction of its weight is battery. My guess is that it will probably tolerate ~2g extra provided that it doesn't alter the position of the cog by much (or you add a small extra weight appropriately to rebalance it) but maybe not much more.

UK coins these days are a mess with the "copper" ones now all magnetic, thicker and going rusty from their first day on the street and the smaller "silver" ones also misbehaving. The older cupronickel coins were worth more as scrap metal than their face value. Somehow the banks still weight coins and get answers but I wonder how well it works now...

Makes parking meters a real PITA since there are hardly any coins still in circulation that they will accept!

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

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