Motorcycle battery for nNovia in the field?

[Denis Danatzko]

I've used 1 nNovia device and it suits my purposes very well, except for the run time. The battery never lasts long enough. I can't fill half the drive before the battery poops out.

I really know little about how to do this, but I'm wondering if a motorcycle battery would give me longer times, (I imagine it would), and where could I learn the info I need to connect the 2 without damaging/ruining the drive?
I'm decently handy, but know little about power, i.e. amperage, voltage, etc.

Any suggestions?

[Bruce James]

A 12V motorcycle battery would certainly work, but could be a bit messy. And motorcycle batteries are better at delivering high current for a short time rather than small current for a long time. You may kill the battery if you deep discharge it.

Maybe a sealed lead acid battery? They are used in burglar alarms, UPS's etc and can normally cope with a deeper discharge at low current.

Personally I use a NiMH NP-25 (Part no. VSN031) battery pack rated at 3.0Ah . See ebay for various suppliers.

You always need 12V for the nNovia, but bigger capacity (amp-hours Ah) means longer run time.

The NiMH batteries are a bit smaller and lighter than lead-acid too.

HTH.
Bruce

[Denis Danatzko]

Thanks, Bruce. At least I have more to go on than I did before.

[Allen Zagel]

Hi Denis
What do you mean the battery runs out fast? I got the nNovia QC deck w/120 media pack and 2 mounts. the anton bauer mount for my DSR-250 and the shoulder mount which has a bag you can clip on your belt, slip on your shoulde or let it hang from the tripod. It came with a sealed pack of 4 what looks like AA batteries and fully charged will run the QC deck for 7 hours. You don't continuously run longer than 7 hours do you?

Now they have a different battery pack so I don't know much about that or how long it will run. Maybe you got one fo the newer ones but looking at the date of your post, I don't think so as I believe they just changed manufacturers in Sept or Oct. I may be wrong though. Unless your powerig it from the camera. Don't know what camera or battery. for my VX2000 I have the big battery that runs the camera for oer 9 hours. I don't run the nNovia off that. on my DSR-250, that's 12v and I use the Anton Bauer Hytron 140's which run both the camera and nNovia for 10 hours or more.

Allen

[Allen Plowman]

I can offer a suggestion, but not a supplier. I drag race motorcycles, and the motorcycles we use do not have a charging system, so it tends to hurt lead acid batteries to run them down and recharge them. we discovered a friend in the computer business, who suggested using batteries from the uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) for the computers battery backup. They are a sealed 12 volt battery designed to be fully discharged and then recharged. They are about the same size as a bike battery. they seem to have more power than the lead acid, last longer before needing recharged, and we are using the old batteries after he has replaced the ones for the computers. all I know is he works for the city maintaining computer systems, I dont know where they come from originally or how much they cost. It might be worth researching.

[Pat Harrison]

I'm building some rugadized systems using A2d decks and have been experimenting with batteries used in the RC industry. My a2d's run 64GB Solid State drives so my recording time max is about 4.5 hours so once I find a solution to support 4.5 hours of recording I'll be done. Once don’t I may package it up and offer it as a solution for the nNovia community. I'll post my findings and a DYI guide once I'm done.

~PH

[Bruce James]

Pat,

I'm really interested in the work you are doing with the A2D and solid state drives.

I look forward to seeing some more info when you get time to do it.

How do you find the speed of the SSDs? and which brand/model are you using?

Here is a project of mine that I started a while back. Still need to sort the audio out, but that wasn't the top priority.

CameraA2DInterface < Custard < TWiki

Bruce

[Pat Harrison]

Bruce,

So you have a custom breakout system that attataches to cameras? Nice. My application Is a bit different but I'm sure my power issues will fold over to almost any application. I can't really give you any specifics yet because of the large investment and my future business use with my device.

I can get with you via email if you have any specific questions but I do plan to post my finding about different battery technologies.

Pat

[Bruce James]

Hi Pat,

At present the breakout is just for translating the cameras VTR pulses into GPI signals.
But I want it to have XLR mic inputs too and at some point use the serial protocol on the nnovia.

I'm really interested in the solid state disks. My nNovia has a 120Gb hard disk and I was considering changing to SSD at some point. More for experiment than necessity at the moment as the HD is working fine, but I'm interested in what works in the nNovia.

Will keep my eyes open for your future post.. Good work...

Bruce

[Pat Harrison]

I've got several projects working with SSD's both Sata and IDE 2.5 . I have several brands that support 100MBPS read/write speeds in the 16 GB range that cost as much as $500. I need that speed for a specific project. I also have a few of the brands that sport speeds equal to what the drives in the A2D run and they work fine, I paid $150 for a 64GB Transcend brand. Now I'm only doing SD resolutions so the QC's that support HDV may need a better performing drive and I do know that NNovia offers SSD media packs for those units, no clue what the specs are on those drives but they are $700+ if I remember correctly.

Pat

[Tillman Bussey]

A motorcycle battery should be quite capable of handling your power requirements.

Please pay close attention to connecting the wiring to the plug for your device and the battery.

There's supposedly an electronics industry standard as to how wires are connect to the type of plug that goes to these types of devices, but the protocols aren't always followed. Here's how it usually goes ----( is ground or negative and 0------ is positive. So on the unit it would look it like this ------(0------ . However the manufacturer may have changed polarities. - +

Hope this helps.

[Allen Zagel]

Hi Tillman

Geez long time! ;-) I thought this thread was closed.

Anyway I used the nNovia with my then Sony VX-2000 and the DSR-250 and it powered right off the camera fine. nNovia also have a power pak bag that has re-chargeable batteries. I got the original one that had better batteries, their later model wasn't as good on battery time.

I have since sold both camera and am now exclusively in HD work using my newer camera Panasonic HPX-1790 P2 camera so the nNovia is no good to me anymore. Thinking of selling the whole nNovia kit.

My entire workflow has changed. I also got rid of all my PC's except 1 and went to Mac. So in the field P2 is dumped into the MBP using ShotPut Pro doing a batch DL to 2 portable HDs.

Then Log and transfer at the studio into FCP.

My how time flies and technology advances so fast!

Thanks for your reply anyway though
Allen