How I charged my drone and camera batteries off-the-grid

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4 Video Views·Nov 2, 2022
Running a full production without any electricity, I'm completely off the grid for five to six weeks,
it's pretty challenging. So I've got a 100 watt solar panel there, a smaller 17 watt
solar panel and I've got a small sort of car battery thing there which stores most of my
electricity and I incorrectly wired it up yesterday the wrong way around and I've affected
the battery badly and it's not pumping out the right amount of volts so the inverter won't work.
So before I came I created my own little charger for my, these are my DJI Mavic batteries
and I've used this little DC to DC inverter because the Mavic battery charger won't charge
unless the volts are more like 13.5 or something like that. If you just use straight 12 volt out
of the battery it won't do it. So this boosts the volts from about 12 up to about 13.5 and it's
enough for me to get the things charging which is so critical to this expedition. It took me
quite a lot of work to get this sorted out. I can also manage to charge it off my small 20,000
milliamp hour power bank as well. You can see I've cut a lot of the connectors and stuff too so I can
basically chop and change. I've got basically three different methods of charging and I've
basically lost my primary method and I'm down to my secondary and tertiary. You know I've got a
mess of different charging stuff. This is a handycam battery, my Nikon batteries which I
flatten every night when I do night style lapses and then just bags of other connections. You know
I've got USB-C, mini, micro, all sorts of different things. It's a bit of a nightmare trying to keep
a track of all the different connections and if I just get one of them wrong, like if I just
lose, forget, leave behind one connector then that whole piece of equipment is gone. So I've
got triple redundancy on most stuff which I need because in an environment like this you get a bit
of water, you lose stuff, you just can't afford for it not to work. So my mind is eased greatly
by the fact that my backup plan is finally working and I haven't wasted all that effort
getting it ready.
