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Oh and I can't seem to see a multi-battery charger, even on the (US) Blade website - can anyone link me to one??
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EFlite EFLC1004 "Celectra" 4-port. About £28. Requires either batteries, or separate 6v PSU (EFLC1005, or similar). Can be powered by car battery, IIRC.
Just be aware with LiPo batteries that they need to be treated with respect. If you discharge them too far, too often, you either degrade them or kill them entirely. So unless you want to be buying new ones far more often than necessary, a good charging regime is necessary.
At the other end, if overcharged, they can be very volatile, especially if damaged. The real danger comes from much bigger ones, but if you've ever seen an abused LiPo let rip with a 3 foot sheet of flame, you treat them with respect. And as it's a chemical flame, once it starts they're next to impossible to put out until they burn out. There's any number of YouTube videos of this. It's worth a google.
When charging a LiPo, a good charger monitors the battery and as it approaches full charge, and progressively cuts charge current down to a trickle. If you have a good multi-port charger, it's doing that for each cell individually. It's effectively four single-port chargers in one box. If you just use a cheap parallel charger, the risk is it's monitoring just one, say cell one. So if one or more of the others is significantly less discharged than cell one, you risk that cell or cells being at the point charge needs to be cut to trickle, but isn't because cell one still needs charging. The result is overchargjng, overheating and just possibly, fire.
My advice is to EITHER get several USB chargers and mains/USB adapters, one per battery, or a good multiport charger. Or just do them one at a time as I suggested in the last post. For the Inductrix size batteries, I'd go for the former. But if you think £30 for a charger is expensive, you really don't want to look at what a multi-battery charger, and 100A PSU for multiple 6 or 8 cell batteries for big birds cost.
I don't intend to scare you with those flame videos, and those Inductrix batteries are very small. I don't have the Inductrix but I do have and have had several dozen of the batteries, and while a few have worn out and died, I have yet to have one explode.
I perhaps take it a bit far, but I have detailed records of every LiPo I've eved had, showing date and time of every charge, and the duration of the charge. You can even get battery monitoring apps for Android, etc, to keep track. If you go no further than Inductrix, it's overkill for sure, but I have numerous and much larger batteries for other things, and keeping track of how a battery has been used gives me advanced warning of problems. I don't use older, 'worn' batteries for long or demanding flights on expensive birds. It isn't worth the risk. This sort of battery discipline is no bad thing, though by no means necessary, at the micro-drone end. And all it needs is a cheap notebook and about 10 seconds per charge to make a note.
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- which our broker was struggling to source and I was wondering who other people used.
. One relatively unimportant question doesn't really warrant £360 a year!
