Assembling the Extended Power Pack

Now it's simply a matter of assembling the bits and pieces in your chosen case, wiring the monitor to the battery and then feeding the battery leads, via a switch to the regulator board and connecting your camera power lead. For assembly I found that by far, the easiest method is to use a hot glue gun. You can buy them real cheap at any craft shop and it makes assembly quick and easy.
OK, let's start at one end and just work towards the other!! Measure the distance between the red and green LED's on your battery monitor board and drill two 3mm holes in the end of the case and insert both LED's thru the holes so all you see from the outside of the case are the tip of the red LED and the tip of the green LED. Now get your hot glue gun and squirt some glue over the LED's to keep them firmly in place as shown above. If you want to, you can also put a couple of dabs of glue between the edge of the board and the plastic case to hold everything tight!!!
Next get your battery pack and you will see it has two cables coming out of it, one with a male connector and one with a female connector. The male connector is your power out and the female connector is to connect the charger plug to the battery to recharge it. You will also see a tiny on-off switch on the side of the battery but for now, leave it off. Now cut off the male plug and expose the red and black cable back about an inch or two. Then place the battery in the case so the cables are facing towards the opposite end of the LED monitor board and apply hot glue all the way around the battery
OK?? Now take your red and black cables from the LED Monitor board and connect them to the exposed battery cables..red wire to red wire and black wire to black wire. For now just strip away 1/2" of the plastic insulation on both red wires and twist them together and strip away the insulation on the black wires and also twist them together. Right??? push the twisted black wires into hole D7 on your voltage regulator board and solder it in and trim off any excess wire. Then take a piece of spare red wire and solder that into hole C8 on the voltage regulator board ...for now leave the single red wire and the twisted red battery wire going nowhere.. we will connect these later!!! Now you can place the voltage regulator board at the base of the battery DON'T glue around it yet!!! Just leave it there as we have two final wires to connect to it!!!!!!.
At the end of the case you can now mount a little switch (I used a slide switch but you can also use a toggle switch) ..while you are there drill a hole big enough for the female battery plug to protrude thru the end of the case and another small hole on the left for your battery cable. Finally take the single red wire that you soldered to hole C8 on your voltage regulator board and solder it to one terminal of the switch and then take your two twisted red wires that come from the battery and solder them to the other terminal of the switch. This switch allows you to stop power running into your voltage regulator all the time so you can turn it on just when you need it.
Now squirt a bit of hot glue around the female battery terminal so it stays in place. Our final job is to connect a camcorder terminal... take your camcorder power lead and cut a short piece (around 6") off it so you have bare wires at one end and the plug that goes into your camera on the other. Strip the insulation off the bare wire end ready to solder into the voltage regulator board. You will see that one wire of the camcorder cable has a stripe on it and this is usually the negative wire. However if in doubt double check the polarity with a multimeter to make sure. The connections are marked on your camera DC input but it's normally the outside as negative and the inside hole is positive. When tested with a multimeter, the outside of the plug case should be connected to the wire with the stripe. OK??? now solder the negative wire (with the stripe) into hole D8 on the voltage regulator board and the other wire into hole B8 on the voltage regulator board. You can now take the voltage regulator board and apply some hot glue to keep it in place.
Double check all your wiring with the diagram above to make sure it's correct and you have put the wires in the correct holes and we are done apart from the adjustments and mounting.
Well, let's now adjust the regulator for the correct voltage and then test out the battery pack and give you some mounting ideas Click Step 5 below to continue. Back to the previous Page STEP 5 - Setting up the Pack