After running out of juice on my Magellan I and quite inaccessible clock drive on my LX-10 in the mists of observing I'm looking to mount some Li-ion batteries into my Meade tripod body. There are several spaces in the top casting that could hold some AA-size cells quite nicely and the power density on the Li-ion cells could be around 1500 to 2000 mA/hr, so that I could power a Mag. I and the scope clock drive both for several days to a week (or more) without needing to recharge.
My question - I want to gang these cells in series to procedure 14.4 volts (12 total 1.2V cells). I could use 3 4X AA-size cell holders and recharge the "standard" AA cells in a charger like what you can get at any photo or discount store for digital camera batteries, but that would mean taking them out of tripod head and the holders to put them into the charger each time they needed recharging. What I would prefer is to hard-wire them into the tripod head with a small 3 LED charge monitor from Radio Shack and then have an external charger I could even leave in place while running the computer box and clock drive and be able to know when I needed to recharge (and still have lots of juice left so things don’t start to die on me).
Since Li-ion’s need special chargers I can’t just use a 14 volt source to do this. Does any one know of such charger sources or plans to build one? I found one place that sells both the cells (as a small 2000 mA/hr pack at 14.4 volts) and a charger but it's over 50 dollars with tax. If I can get 1.2 volt 1800 mA/hr cells from American Sci. and Surplus for about $1.50 each and either build or get a cheap charger for far less this would then be doable.
Any ideas??
Thanks for any info! Dark skies.
TM
Tom Mengel
Moderator Equipment Talk
“Insanity: Trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.
Albert Einstein
