Yesterday we had bad weather in Oregon. A lot of wind and damages all over the place. We were lucky in the neighborhood, and we just had to suffer a few power outages. So we stayed off-the-grid and turned most of the equipment off during the storm. Nonetheless, this morning I went ahead and worked on running the Joule on batteries as planned last week.

I received most of the parts I was expecting, so I could power-up the board using the 5.2Ah LiPo battery I mentioned in my last post. For this test, I decided to use a UBEC (Universal Battery Elimination Circuit) by Matek Systems. I picked this one because of the battery monitoring and the low voltage alarm features it packs. Indeed, we should always be very cautious when storing, handling and operating LiPo batteries. These batteries are storing a huge amount of energy, so be always very cautious.

If interested, the last pictures/videos of the post’s gallery demonstrate a few devices/steps one should take to minimize risks. I didn’t decide yet if this will be the UBEC I’ll use for the rocket’s power distribution system, but for the tests, it worked as expected. The Joule booted and ran flawlessly, no surprises. Although I received on-time the 1.4Ah battery, I didn’t get my XT30 connectors yet, so I’ll do that test later on. Have a nice week!

Pin