Battery for Hyperion EOS 0720i Super Duo Dual

Hi Nick:
Welcome to the forum -- and thanks for the kind words.

Quadrocopter do have these units http://www.quadrocopter.com/Goal-Zero-Extreme-350-Power-Pack_p_697.html, but I've not done the math to see whether they provide more power than a simple deep-cycle marine battery. As you probably saw the Hyperion does come with some leads and alligator clips. For marine batteries, Costco Kirkland seem to have quite a good following on the Internet. I couldn't find them by searching costco.com, but there lots of references if you search for "costco marine deep cycle" (without quotation marks) on Google.

The other approach you might also want to consider is http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/models/eu2000i -- of course it's much more expensive, but for a forthcoming shoot into the boonies of Oregon, I'm going to get one. If you have two of these beasties you can gang them together with a special cable to get 4,000 watts, and have some backup capability. Of course, then you have to mess around with gas cans, etc.

Andy.

 

I have the Honda 2000i powering the eFuel 1200 from QC. Solid combination. Tried a deep cycle marine battery, 125ah, and it would get through one charge cycle and be down to about 60% on the reserve. No way to get through a day.

 

Scott my Honda 1000 wouldn't handle the load of the eFuel and running 20amps on each side of the Hyperion using parallel charging.

 

Scott I usually charge at 2C which is the default limit on the 7201i. But 2C for a Freefly 9000's is 18amps. At 5 amps, while I have read that slow is good, most folks would be going to sleep getting batteries charged.

 

Yes you will be fine. I had the Honda 1000 and it just didn't handle the load. Unless you are doing parallel charging not likely that you will hit the 20amps on a channel. The Hyperion is set at a 2C charge rate by default (it can be changed in one of the menus). So unless you are charging one of the new QC 10000's any other single battery per side won't hit the max load on the channel unless you change the programming.

 

Zach correct. The Honda 1000 would not handle the eFuel and Hyperion. And yes you will be fine with the Honda 2000 and the eFuel/Hyperion combo.

 

Zach: Be absolutely certain to connect up the EC5 connectors to the parallel charging board BEFORE you connect up the balance leads. If you do not, there is a good chance you will fry the balance lead part of the parallel charging board if there is a mis-match in the LiPo voltages.

I'm not entirely convinced, for the larger capacity batteries, of the benefits of parallel charging -- sure you can hook up more batteries, but because of the per channel limits of the Hyperion, it reduces the effective charge rate per LiPo.

Just to illustrate: Imagine you have six QC6200s and you normally charge them at 2C. That means three charging cycles to charge them all up. On the other hand, if you connect up six of them to one side of the Hyperioni (as you can do with the Progressive RC paracharging boards), then you've got a total of 20 Amps spread across six Lipos. That means charging them at 3.3Amps -- roughly 0.5C.

If you tried to charge six QC010000's (the new batteries). You could charge two of them at a time at 2C without the paracharging board. Alternatively, you could charge six of them one Hyperion port at 3.3 Amps (again), which would be 0.16C.

I've not played with the numbers or experimented that much so there may be a sweet spot where you spend a minimum amount of time charging.

The other concern I have is that, while I try to land when the LiPos hit 14.4, often it doesn't work out and some of them will be at 14.4, some down to 14.1. The voltages bounce back when you stop the motors, of course, but I'm not sure I can guarantee that the LiPo's that I want to parallel charge will be within 0.1V of each other. That means there's going to be an "in-rush" current flow when I first connect them up to the paracharging board that might be quite significant -- especially because the internal resistance of one LiPo is already pretty low (e.g. 38 milliohms) -- but when you connect two, three, four, five, and six in parallel, the resistance is dropping even lower as you do it.

Has anyone actually worked the numbers for QC6200's, QC8000's, and QC10000's to see whether paracharging makes sense given the upper bound on the charging current per Hyperion port?

Thanks
Andy.

 

I have lost 3 paracharging boards. First two were probably from me not hooking up the EC5s first. Hard to find that advice. Very well buried. Third one fried being meticulous about hooking up the balance leads after waiting about a minute with the EC5's connected.

Found the following fused boards at EPBuddyrc.com http://www.buddyrc.com/paraboard-v3-xh-ec5.html. All circuits are fused. They have similar boards for Dean's etc. No issues yet with the buddy boards.

But like Andy i don't know if the benefits outweigh the challenges. If you were using a iCharge 4010 Duo it will do 40 amps per channel. To drive it the suggested power supply is a 2000w 48v output Mean Well which is about $450. And on 110v you don't get the full 2000w output. Nor will it supply a full 40amps to both channels.

Better perhaps to have 2 charges/Power supplies and just keep feeding batteries while you fly or back at home base. Andy is correct, in some ways it isn't any faster when you start using larger batteries where you can't maintain a 2C charge rate for the total of all the batteries. With the FF 9000's if you wanted to charge two of them you would need a 36amp charger to get 2c. Hyperion just doesn't have the oomph.

 

I use two eFuels and four Hyperions. That's my definition of parallel charging.

Andy.