Hi all,
Just thought I should raise a bit of awareness into the research being conducted at Loughborugh University here in the UK!
I'm in the early stages of a 4yr project implementing both PEM and SOFC fuel cells into small unmanned, commercial off the shelf, aircraft using ArduPilot Mega 2 (later ARMPilot when it comes out!)
More info is on my DiyDrones profile!
One thing I'm currently seeking advice on is connecting two power supplies to one ESC. I'd sooner have an ESC with two inputs that is already set up for redundancy and switching between the two power supplies when one runs out (voltage cut-off). Does anyone know of such a device?
Happy flying this summer!
Simon
Replies
After researching this a lot, looks like a couple of high power diodes with a heatsink and a bank of mosfets is the way forwards!
Simon,
I know there is a way to make a voltage monitor and have it switch to another when it gets down so far.
What my question is: Why would you need this if you just parrallel two batteries and then you would have the same amount of flight time even if you could switch between the two?
Because one problem I see with switching is hopefully you could make it fast enough that it wouldn't have a chance for the esc to shut down. Also if it didn't switch fast enough then you would lose the APM and GPS location.