Hi all,

I have a couple of Hota chargers for charging my lipo's. I see they can also act as a power supply. For example if I'm working on the drone on the bench can I use this feature to power the drone? I assume I would just need to match the sum total voltage of the lipos when charged and set this on the charger? So for a 6s 25.2v, I think it has a power setting in watts too. I'm not sure what I'd select there, I need a value in amps to calculate power. Thanks for the help

Yes you can, I've never used my Hota d6+ to power a drone but I've used it to power a 1s charger. In the case of the 1s charger the max voltage was up to 15v so I choose something like 3amps which would be 45 watts (volts x amps = watts).

My screen was cracked for a long time on my charger so I started using the bluetooth app which is VERY buggy but I learned its quirks. I noticed when I use the power supply setting the app works in watts but operating from the charger buttons it has you select in amps. I noticed no matter what power setting the BT app sets it seems like the charger only outputs at it's lowest wattage setting (like 0.1 watts) which of course causes the 1s charger to complain or in the case of powering a drone like you want to do, it would be too low. So when setting in power supply mode I just use the buttons directly on the charger.

In your case you can just set it 3-4 amps so 75-100 watts or so. I'm assuming you're not doing throttle punches so you could probably set for much lower but I wouldn't want to set it so low that brown outs would be occurring on parts. The drone is only going to pull the current that it needs. Like the circuits in a car using the same large 12v battery, the alternator pulls many amps, a dash LED pulls a tiny fraction of an amp.

I use the Hota D6 Plus (non pro/dc only version) as a quick on the bench power supply to power the drones during setup.

Just select the voltage output and power output.

Its good enough for quick bench tests to spin motors and test the vtx.

You can estimate the amps it will output by a simple formula:

watt=amp X volt
Power=Current x Voltage

Thanks guys, good to know. I guess for amps it just needs to be enough for driving the motors at very low revs etc. Then I can calculate the power required. So as you say perhaps 3-4 amps is sufficient. I'm not going to fry any boards or hardware would be my concern.

A device only pulls the current it needs so the only issue would be incorrect voltage, too low, too high, wrong polarity etc.

In the case of a short or fault then it would be better to have less current in the supply but in that situation a part still fails. Like a regulator burning a small hole in its package vs violently detonating. Or what would happen if you dropped a metal tool across the vbat input.

Pretty sure the Hota will show you the actual current draw so you can get an idea. Or see what it pulls with one motor spinning vs all of them. Just give yourself some extra headroom. Again, it's not like you'll have props on and be punching the throttle. But if you do please get video...

I likely wouldn't have arms to be able to post the video thanks again

Next problem, need a f/f XT60 cable for one drone and f Xt60 to f XT30 for second drone to connect the charger/drone. They dont seem to exist commercially, all I can find is male to female. Guess I have to buy all the wire and connectors and make this myself? Charging a battery to power the drone is now looking like the easier option..

Cables are easy enough to make your own. I made an xt60 to xt60 for a similar purpose.

I also have some decent alligator clip cables that work as well since we don’t draw high amps on the bench.

Yeah I know it's just I didn't think I needed that many cables to make buying all the bits viable and now I just need one or two specialist cables. Although it's small beer really in the grand scheme of drone related expense! The alligator clips isn't a bad idea as a work around. Thanks