My brother builds DIY PCs with used parts for a living. One of the main struggles he experiences when buying used hardware (GPUs, CPUs, motherboards, memory) from people, is that a lot of people are out there scamming others by selling broken or faulty parts.
When he’s able to, he asks the person to demonstrate the hardware working in their computer, but sometimes he has to bring his own computer with him and go to their house to power it. The problem I’m trying to solve – how to power his test-bench when the exchange takes place somewhere without power outlets.
There are ready-made solutions from Jackery and the like, but why carry a heavy power bank when there’s one under your feet! So I’m on the hunt for a ~800W 240V AC inverter that can be supplied with 36V - 60V DC (for 12s boards). But from what I’ve seen online, most take 12 or 24V as input.
Does anyone have recommendations? Has anyone done this? Maybe even integrated a power inverter into their board?
Let this be the thread to discuss AC power inverters powered by Li-Ion batteries!
I’ll have to skip through it to see what voltage he based his setup off…
Edit: Gah! He just mentions the inverter at the end briefly, and doesn’t link to the one he used. His battery was 12s though, so we know they exist!
would like input from @Battery_Mooch as well, does using invertor hurt the cells at all? i imagine its basically just like a powerwall? but just being portable
Also look at this – the spec sheet mentions maximum DC short current. These things are meant for solar panels, so I wonder if that means a powerful Li-Ion battery that will produce much higher current when shorted would kill the device?
That would be much cheaper and more efficient (and probably easier though I’m not 100%) to just get DC-DC. DC-AC is veeery inefficient, especially in consumer type applications that emulate a wall outlet. What camera gear are you using? I got a USB powered battery charger for Sony alpha series, I assume the same exists for smaller stuff like GoPros
Short answer is no unless it’s a badly made DIY circuit that doesn’t filter/buffer the input and runs the highish frequency pulses directly from the battery. It would have to be astoundingly stupid to do that though, like a VESC with no capacitors
What specific things do you have? Usually for electronics you’re a lot better off staying as close as possible to stuff that’s widely used for other applications because big market share means economies of scale and decent design, ie start with USB/USB PD because you can get high efficiency cheap stuff easily for that. The only issue would be if you’re powering something that definitely can’t be interfaced to USB C without like 4 intermediary steps
Here is a 48v pure sine wave version that has an input range of 40-61v
You would just need a connector and wires coming out of the skateboard that were able to handle whatever current this thing is going to pull. The charge port may not be enough.
I got this in 2017 so micro USB and old gen alpha batteries, but it’s cheap as chips and still works fine today as my only charger. I found quite a few new ones on my search as well, this has micro and type C input and runs the newer z batteries, the redundancy seems great but if possible I’d recommend a horizontal mounting one rather than vertical. In my experience they make a bit more reliable of a connection because the battery doesn’t wobble
Is it likely your video lights have a battery slot in the back for V mount or Sony NPF? I think unless they’re truly enormous theater lights it’s unlikely they need AC input, like they usually just either have DC in the back, battery slots, or both
What do you mean from their own plug with a buck sorry?
Haha yeah they have sony battery mounts, another idea would be to just make some with 21700 cells
They accept like 19.5v input from a barrel jack that comes off their AC plug. I was saying I could just output that voltage from whatever device was created
