My Sovereign/Musketeer Li-ion power system

[akille68]

Hello Folks,
Today I made this mod, inserting a 3000 mAh 12v Li-ion battery in an old alkaline battery holder for the Sovereign GT and Musketeer Advantage.



A) First of all I decided to be safe and insert a 300 ma fuse, to protect my machine from shorts;




B) I removed the door panel and after some tries I started to sand all the exceeding parts to gain a bit more of depth;






C) I put a black sticker to cover all the mess I made on the bottom of the battery holder;



D) Everything in place;



E) Voltage of the fully charged battery;




D) When You wanna to put it on charge, just open a bit battery slide door and the plug is ready;



Enjoy!!

 

[Bromly]

Looks great,what kind of run time are you getting on a full charge? Thanks for posting.



Ken

 

[Sven]

Nice job, sure beats replacing alkaline batteries.

 

[akille68]

Thank U guys,
Today i gave it a try. After 4 and 1/2 h it measured 12,6 v. I think that i could last 40/50 hours with headphones.
I am gonna to try something new for my 5900 di pro sl...stay tuned!

 

[MHirschmann]

That is sweet! Well done Alessandro! Keep us posted how it works -Marc

 

[Critterhunter]

Nice job! The Sovereign draws about 50 to 70ma (depending on load, IE: sounding or not sounding off to targets), so to figure run time divide the capacity by 70ma and that should give you the bare minimum run time.

I'm running a 3 cell lipo in my GT. 750ma versus the 1000ma stock nimh pack, but run times seem as long due to lipos holding the voltage very high until near end of discharge. the low battery alarm kicks in on the Sovereign or Excal around 9.8 to 10V, so no risk of draining a 3 cell lipo lower than the 9V minimum (3V per cell) that might ruin a lipo. Much lighter than the stock pack or even 8AAs of course. 1 hour charge times without pushing the pack. Was only $7 so I bought two of them. Don't self discharge on the shelf like nimhs or nicads so they are ready to rock months later. Lipos got a bad rap early on as being a fire risk but that was due to them not having balance ports primarily. Never had trouble with a lipo in my RC electric planes or such over the last 6 or 7 years of use, and even crashing them badly here and there. Just like any other battery, treat them right and they behave themselves, abuse them and bad things can happen.

Pics below and thread here with more details...

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?22,1762234

I just grinded down the ribs at the bottom of the holder without doing any other mods other than soldering in a tiny JST plug. The alkaline holder will still work with 8AAs, as the ribs aren't really needed. Didn't have to grind them down but didn't want to risk slitting the lipo (VERY bad idea). In fact, haven't finished grinded them down. I only snipped them out a bit with toe nail clippers just to take some pressure off the lip with the lid of the holder pressing down on it. Really need to finish that job or risk a puncture.

 

[akille68]

Thank U Critter, I saw your excellent job! I made a similiar mod for my two 5900 di pro sl with a 7,4v 2s Turnigy nanotech 2.2 + an Hobbywing voltage regulator (from 7,4 nominal (8,4 v fully charged) to 6v) on the original four C cells battery holder. A specific 3d will follow in the next days.
Also I ported the li ion mod on a White's 8 aa cell battery holder. More informations will follow.
My next goal is to upgrade the silly Explorer/Etrac nimh power system....
Take r.
Ale

 

[Critterhunter]

Are you sure you need a voltage regulator to tame down the voltage? I'd Email Whites and find out what the high end is the regulator that exists in the detector already can handle. Often voltage regulators for say an 8AA 12V detector will have a high end window of perhaps 14 to 15V or so they can handle. Whites is pretty good at handing out tech info so I bet they'd tell you, or you could open the machine, read the model # off the regulator, and then look up it's specs online to find out.

What kind of regulator are you using too? If it's linear, a good idea is to add an extra heat sink to it, as many of those regulators designed for RC planes and such rely on air flow to cool them and so don't have the biggest heat sinks on them. On my RC electric planes I cut off the heat shrink on the flat/hard side of ESCs or regulators and then epoxy an extra ribbed heat sink to it with some heat sink paste (radio shack) in the middle of it when glued on. I've over amped ESCs by as much as 5 to 10 amps in the air by doing this. Usually RC stuff uses linear regulators, which get rid of excess voltage by converting it to heat to waste off onto the heat sink. Switching regulators do it more efficiently and differently, but they are more costly and also generate a lot of EMI by how they pulse the output power to control voltage. That could be very bad for a detector's performance so I wouldn't use one for that, but even with linear regulators there is a risk for causing onboard EMI. You might want to look up some capacitor/choke simple circuits designed to isolate and kill any circuit board noise the regulator generates so it doesn't effect detector performance. I'd also shield the regulator from the detector by way of some RF shielding (tinfoil works great like say a pie pan) and ground it to the existing detector RF shield.

Good luck.

 

[akille68]

Hi Critter. It is a switch regulator, and also I was in doubt about emi, but I tested it and no chattery or threshold instability occurred. I tried with different settings and sensitivity, but nothing...

I know that 5900 has an internal regulator, but audio is directly connected to the power source. So my fear was to burn audio output. A fully charged lipo erogates 8,4 v...

Take r.

Ale

 

[akille68]

Ops we posted in the wrong 3d...

 

[Bill - De]

Nice work. I am interested in this as well, as I am getting a Sovereign.