Powering and Charging Overland Electronics - How we charge everything! - Everlanders See the World!

[Music] welcome back everyone in this video all the battery powered stuff starting off with basic usb rechargeable stuff that's easy how i've hacked battery operated things to be usb rechargeable and lastly some 12 volts stuff that i've standardized connectors on to make it more useful for us on the road so let's get into it alright so first things first usb rechargeable stuff it's pretty basic doesn't really need an explanation but i'll elaborate just a little bit if you let i've set up this drawer as a usb charge station for all things usb i've got a 12 volt to 5 volt 5 amp regulator that feeds some of these items just with basic 5 volts but some newer things like telephones and power delivery option units need 9 volts and other fancy power so that's what this charger is here it takes 12 volts in and provides power delivery usb which is you know the fast charge for newer phones so that's the power supply side then i've got some things like our little bluetooth speaker it has a little holster so it can just set on there and plug in and then up here at the front uh uh wireless charging pods for our phones those are really nice just to throw your phone in close the drawer and go to sleep and then other stuff like micro usb and we use that to plug in things and then i've got all sorts of other usbc connections and so on in here and then now let's jump up back to the table and i'll show you some of the devices all right let's blow through some of this usb stuff really quick here uh firstly the the older style standard for usb is micro usb and that is the standard that's used on our 18650 charger that's running our gimbal and i also use these batteries for all sorts of other hackery which you'll see here in a bit next is our old school gopro it also has a usb rather micro usb connection many of our battery chargers for our bigger cameras also micro usb some bluetooth earbuds great for running you're working out next is this arb pureview 800 flashlight it's got this spinning ring and it's a really amazing flashlight super bright also micro usb powered next is this uh little gimbal carry uses for her phone just for running run and gun type stuff also micro usb these are really handy too we picked up a set of two of these usb rechargeable little lights and they have two functions the top glows bright white obviously and has dimmable modes and the bottom section has uv leds in there and bug zappers and it of course is uh usb rechargeable also this one's currently dead so time for a recharge all right the next standard is usbc this is the newer better in my opinion standard that's on most modern phones these days so obviously uh the phone connector uses that also our new action camera as you can see and our wireless mic sets also usbc nothing too amazing there but just thought i'd show that as an overview now let's get into the hacked stuff all right so next are things that weren't designed to be usb rechargeable these are the black thigh bug zappers and some time ago i opened it up modified it and put in a single 18650 lithium battery holster like this and that worked great it went for many months without needing to be recharged but i have these usb micro usb lithium battery charge controllers and i've been carrying them so i figured i'm going to modify some of this other stuff here this week and make it usb rechargeable so all that i needed to do for that was just solder the wires to the battery just for a little extra room there wasn't room for both the charge controller and the battery holster in this handle so i've just hardwired soldered it on soldered in the uh the usb charger and i just need to affix this in here with double-sided tape or epoxy which i'll show in just a moment another great hack for these black fly bug zappers and probably any bug zapper is there's a 47 mega ohm resistor across the outputs right near the uh the big charge capacitor here and if you just clip this lead and disconnect it that will increase the power quite a bit uh and it removes the safety unfortunately so when you disconnect the button or when you stop pressing the button the uh the grid stays charged and energized long after i can demonstrate for you another side effect of lithium on these controllers is they were designed for three volts so running it at 3.7 it's hot that is to say it's angry all the time oh you guys can hear that it's buzzing and uh displeased with the world but when you hit a bug it vaporizes it even the big boys so a side effect of cutting that resistor it's a lot more powerful but it stays charged so just be aware of that that when you set it down you can place your hand on it and it will get you [Music] all right another thing we carry around that is battery operated are these philips sonicare toothbrushes they charge just by setting on top of these uh the base charger here but these are 110 powered and i really dislike that because uh then we need to have our inverter running which wouldn't be so bad except these toothbrushes take about 10 hours to charge and so just have this sitting on the counter for 10 hours with the inverter running seemed inefficient also because it's just sitting on this base we can't have that driving down the road and so i went ahead and opened it up as you can see here and i tested the capacity of the battery it's still at over 500 milliamps which is basically what they're specced at and so i ran a discharge test on it it ran for 70 some minutes at 500 milliamps and so the battery is good and so then i went ahead and tested with a usb charge circuit that i've shown you here already and it charges just fine and so then i trim this board to be round so that it'll fit in the butt end of the toothbrush and tested that it's still charged overnight and it did so i'm going to put this usb charge circuit in the butt end of the toothbrush and put it all back together and while it's true you can get phillips sonicare toothbrushes with little travel cases that are really nice induction charging inside of the case via usb i'd love to have them but they're 250 or 300 each and if i was buying a toothbrush new or buying these again i would certainly buy the upgraded model that has that functionality but like i said these even though they're old they're maybe five or six seven years old already their battery capacity is still full and they work great and these usb recharge circuits are to the 50 cents a piece so for a quick little mod and it's fun to do i'll have that usb functionality anyway so before you comment telling me that they exist i know i'm just modding something we already had next is bigger power consumption devices namely our little dyson cordless vac it has a five cell lithium pack in there additionally our milwaukee tool set uh i've got the the drill impact driver sawzall side grinder and this nearly useless flashlight and they too have five cell with the impacts so that's a little more complicated you can't just use these uh usb charge boards uh you can use a balance charger like this where this is the imax b6 mini by the way i have the same one i blew up about a month ago i i like it so much i ordered another one um but anyway it has cell taps on this connector on the side to connect to each of the cells in the pack and monitor and balance the cells as it charges them so that's a great way to do it but it it's going to involve opening up the battery pack or the device and tapping a lead to each cell and i haven't bit the bullet on that yet for for these bigger devices just because i don't need to charge them that often and it's not such an inconvenience to have the the battery in its charger which stays connected and i can leave it driving down the road with the inverter on so that's that the same is true for things like our our drones the big drones they have a five or six cell lithium pack in those and dji does make a portable 12 volt charger but it's a bit expensive in my opinion and we can charge those sorts of things that are infrequently charged off of the the inverter all right next is 12 volt things lots of consumer appliances that you buy have wall adapters we're all familiar with them and most of them convert 110 mains voltage to a lower safer dc voltage and in my case many of these things are 12 volts this brother printer for example is a 12 volt power supply and so i can just feed 12 volts right into here [Applause] similarly the power cord for the dremel charger is a 12 volt barrel connector and as luck would have it they're the same five by 2.5 millimeter connector and i recently got a new soldering iron our old weller plug-in 110 version has been a good workhorse nice and small for traveling but adam savage recently did a one-day build where he reviewed this ts-100 12-volt soldering iron that's uh programmable temperature controlled detects when you place it down and and switches off uh it's a really great soldering iron and it too uses 12 volt power via the 5.5 by 2.5 millimeter barrel connector so to connect all these 12 volt things i've standardized a cable that has a five millimeter by 2.5 millimeter barrel connector on one end and a xt60 connector on the other these are my favorite go-to higher current connections uh they're great because they have really sturdy brass terminals and they're polarized so let me show you how this works it plugs in to a 12 volt power supply or 12 volt source i have a connection underneath on our breaker panel and electrical system which is located beneath my seat here i'll show you in just a second all right around the side compartment of the truck i'll just show you quickly here also more of the same xt60 powertap connections so i can plug this in right here i've got one in the cab and that gives us lots of flexibility for where i can plug in and get some decent current 12 volt power but i've also rigged up various other sources that i can tap power from this is our little tack life battery boost pack i've shown it a little bit before it's really great because it has a 12 volt output right here and you can connect a barrel connector to it and then i have the mating connector for that here turn this on and then this is live and if i want to power up my soldering iron for example power if i want to charge this thing it should be lit up there we go lit up now i don't really love this holster i was considering putting a xt60 connector right in the butt of the dremel might still do that but for now the holster lives similarly i can plug in the little label printer if i need to or this imax b6 mini also has the five millimeter by 2.5 millimeter connector so i can plug that in so kind of jumping all over the place there but the gist of it is this xt60 connector is the source and i can get 12 volts from the attack life boost pack i can plug it in beneath my seat here and get 12 volts another mod i did was to our drill tool set now i know you can buy from milwaukee a attachment that you can slide onto a battery pack and it has a barrel connector and you can plug into that i've repaired several of those because they have a circuit board that connects the contacts in here to the barrel connector and that circuit board has a thin little trace and if you try and put any significant amount of power through it it burns the trace right off the board and you have to buy them so i went ahead and opened up our milwaukee flashlight it's fine but i don't really use it very much so i didn't feel it was such a big sacrifice so anyway i opened it up and soldered a connector right to the contacts on the battery now this is going to be coming out at 16 volts probably but this many of these devices will tolerate that your results may vary i won't get into it but now if i need to go see what i'm doing while soldering something i can go and do that with this battery pack as well also my battery charger i would never do this charge a battery from a battery but by having standardized connectors i could all right so let me give you a little a little more detail on the soldering iron which is kind of the whole point i started making this video this is the ts-100 i saw it on adam savage's uh youtube channel he was showing it off in a one-day build where he made a little soldering cart and i thought it was a really cute little yet powerful option to have so as you can see it comes in two sections the cartridge heater element clips in the front you can screw it down although i haven't done that yet just because i don't need to when you plug it in it boots up shows the software version and prompts you to press the button to turn it on so it stays cool until you turn it on on that topic it also has a usb type b connection here and you can update the firmware on it to run newer firmware although what comes stock is pretty amazing in my opinion as you can see it has a little oled display here and you can cycle through various settings and adjust them it shows the current temperature of the tip 25 degrees room temperature and 16 point uh 1 volts coming off of that drill battery right now you can do a factory reset you can set the working temperature 300 the standby temperature sleep time 180 seconds it'll turn off automatically temperature steps of 10 degrees off voltage at 10 volts so it'll automatically turn off if your battery supply voltage is getting too low tons of features in there really handy and like i said it doesn't turn on if you're not using it so once this times out here you can see it shows to press the button to start it up and then you can see the temperature climbing and the thing i really love about it is it's fast this thing heats up in a few seconds 10 seconds on the first the first go i have it set to 300 c and it's already there obviously it's gonna melt solder so that's really handy and it's uh it's slick because when you set it down it can it has an accelerometer in it and it can tell you're not holding it anymore and it turns off so yeah that's the ts 100 soldering iron i was happy to have received it because we've got a big project coming up here where i've custom designed printed circuit boards with the p channel hex fets on there and that's going to replace all the relay boards in the truck that control the power to all the things and uh so there's going to be lots of soldering in that project coming up and i'd like to thank all of our channel members you can see them scrolling by here these guys are legends uh putting up a few bucks every month so that we can do things like this and make great videos for you guys and all we appreciate every subscriber if you can't chip in that's cool there's lots of youtube channels i watch that i can't support either but for those guys who are chipping in a few bucks every month they're getting a little bit of extra perks we've got members only area on the website where you can view how we built the truck all the parts list for everything we used as well as uh you know getting a shout out in the video like this and their names printed on the back of the circuit boards so i'm trying to give them some added value for their contributions which allow us to make these videos for free for all of you guys on youtube so thanks so much to those guys thanks so much for watching see you next time

Channel: Everlanders

Views: 11,015

Keywords: TS100, ts100 soldering iron, TS100 Review, Imax B6 Mini, 18650, Overland USB Charging, Overland Electronics, Overland Solar, charging camera solar, camping charger, Bug zapper recharge, hacking 18650 charger, sonicare hack, sonicare usb charger, usb rechargeable toothbrush, M18 battery external power, xt60, xt60 solar, diy camper, overland expo, tiny house tour, off grid living, off grid solar power system, car camping setup, car camping gear, off grid tiny house

Id: jMiqbT4abH8

Length: 20min 30sec (1230 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020