FT Guinea Pig Wiring Battery

[jaskoller]

Currently building the FT Guinea. I'm curious what other people have done on the power/wiring. Has anyone run separate batteries for each ESC? If so, how did you do that? I have some ideas, but wanted to see what the community does. I'm assuming most people just run one battery. Please let me know what you guys are doing. Thank you.

 

[dgrigor02]

I have never attempted seperate batteries, I can only speak from a logical point of view. Batteries as they age may not discharge at the same rate and volts between the two could vary. May make it challenging to adjust for the slight differential between the two motors throughout the flight.

 

[razor02097]

I remember Peter specifically warned against using separate batteries in a video on his channel...I wish I remembered the video. I may have to look that up later.

Most people make a parallel Y harness (often referred to as a break out cable) to tie the ESCs together. If you don't want to mess with that you can wire the two ESCs together but you would lose the modular pods as they would be physically wired together.

 

[Craftydan]

Balance between two separated packs could be an issue with a wide disparity in their age or heavily taxing them, but more often than not, you know which packs you have are new or getting old, and if you've setup differential thrust to the rudder, even that can be trimmed out.

I'd laid out how to run a two battery ship for the Kraken here, but for the Guinea this method could be extended by either mounting a third battery for power in the fuselage and running both pods as "slaves", or routing servo/RX power into the fuselage from one pod in the traditional way.

 

[jaskoller]

Thank you for the link Craftydan, I had looked at that quite a while ago and couldn't find it again.

If I decide to run one battery, do I take the power wire out of one of the motor connectors going into my receiver?

 

[dgrigor02]

I take the red pin out of the aux1 motor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9xeg_3eREc

 

[Spastickitten]

I thought of putting xt60s right where the power pod is to keep the swappableness

 

[jaskoller]

All great thoughts and advice, thank you. Due to all the different batteries I have I think I have decided to run my ESC power leads together to a common connection for the battery. I can always use my adapter to run two batteries together if I need to. So I may use a power distribution board like I do with my tricopter to power all my electronics (or solder an adapter). I do like CraftyDan's suggestion above. Still some things to ponder.

 

[tamuct01]

When I first built my Guinea Pig I ran a parallel harness to a single 3S 2200. It did ok, but flight times were <6 mins. I removed the parallel harness and have been running it with two 3S 2200s--one for each ESC. I disabled one of the BECs and that ESC is plugged into my AUX channel. I usually attach a battery beeper to the pack that is running the receiver, servos, and ESC. The other should discharge slightly less. I bought all my 3S 2200 batteries at the same time and they discharge the same.

All that being said, I'm contemplating going back to a parallel setup and get a bigger battery. Maybe a 4S 2200-3300. So the answer is: yes, you can run one battery per ESC successfully, but as always YMMV.

 

[jaskoller]

Thanks Tamuct01. I've decided to run parallel batteries. Thank you