Applications for Power Banks

#1

When I hear of power banks, my first thought always was: they are designed to load cell phones and portable computers.

Since I am model builder, my idea is now to use a power bank for my remote controlled model ships. Here you see an example:

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The small ship in the foreground is the little child (not remote controlled) of the big one in the background, which is remote controlled.

A view inside the big ship shows the actual situation:

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On the left side you see the NiMh batteries and their connector. Now my idea is to replace these batteries with a power bank. What I need is a connector cable between power bank and ship. The connector on the battery side looks like this, where the square hole is plus and the rounded hole is minus:

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Because I have also other motorized ships, I could put the power bank into the ship which goes for a swim. What do you think of this ?

And maybe you have other kind of application for power bank ?

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#2

genial !!!

1 Like
#3

They are generally used for charging phones, and it will be cheaper to just buy the li-on cells by themselves for things like this, as that’s what is used in the batteries anyway, but this is still a nice idea!

#4

Yes 580baby, I understand. But think also of this: at the moment I do not have Li Po Accus. And also no charging device. So if I buy both, I will be in the same price area as with a power bank.

The Li Po Accu I can use only for my ship.

But the Power Bank I can use for many other things …

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#5

Yeah, sure, I was just mentioning.

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#6

I have a buddy who uses battery packs with his drone. He has a custom carbon fiber drone he made and he uses a 10k batterypack to extend his flight time. The motors he uses is strong enough to support the added weight and it’s cheaper than him buying lipo batteries he would otherwise use. Not to mention the safety factor of the battery being enclosed.

As for the connectors, you can buy them or make them yourself using a cheap USB cable and splicing the ends off and together with that of what your device uses.

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#7

This might be another application for a power bank.

I have a good coffee grinder, operated by hand. The advantage of this grinder is: the coffee beans are ground - and after grinding nothing of the coffee is left in the grinder. And the grinder is very fine adjustable, which is necessary especially for espresso.
But i did not like the manual operation, therefore fitted it with a 12 V DC gear motor which does about 100 rpm.

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You see the grinder on the right side. At the moment the power is supplied by an old laptop battery. For loading, I put the battery into the laptop over night.

But, as mentioned, could be powered also by a power bank …