Thursday, June 3, 2010

Quad-rotor and LiPo

Some notes on LiPo batteries:
  1. Here's a good summary. In particular:
    1. We need a connector to mate with the battery's taps, to check that each cell is fully charged. A charge balancer would be nice; I've added one to the parts list.
    2. We need a safe charging set-up, with a bucket of sand handy and probably a Pyrex dish with sand to charge batteries in.
    3. Don't charge at more than 1C.
    4. Our ESCs have a built-in low-voltage cutoff that is set to (starting battery voltage) * 0.74. So, the batteries MUST BE FULLY CHARGED BEFORE CONNECTING THEM for this to work properly.
    Now, what neat things can a quad-rotor do?


    The list:

    1. Look up info re: LiPo charging / discharging
    2. Look for 1A inverting regulator
    3. Consider appropriate battery for quad-copter
    4. Review paper
    5. XBee / Bluetooth
    6. Finish deriving and document dynamics

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