Multiple devices...one battery?

[Vince inTX.]

My brother owns a 1/4 scale Pitts Special. He has an onboard starter and onboard glow driver. Both of these devices are great in and of themselves. The problem lies in the fact that each of them has different voltage requirements....the wing loading on this plane is going through the roof due to the many batteries (6v receiver battery too). :mad:

Now for my question. Does anyone make a power distribution system/device that can drive all of these devices from a single battery? Something like a BEC that does not involve e-flight?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide even if you just tell me it's a pipe dream

Vince

[steve lewin]

It would certainly be possible to build something that incorporated regulators for different voltage outputs driven form one power source. I don't know of any such thing commercially produced and it may not really be worth doing. If the voltage range was very large simple regulators would probably end up getting hot. It would also add another failure point to the system. Would you really want a shorted glow driver to kill the single battery so you lose the radio too ?

One simpler possibility might be to make up a special battery pack with taps at different levels so you could connect to 1, 2, 5 or whatever cells. But that would cause problems with the wildly different loads on the cells.

I think the best thing to do is just to size each battery carefully. After all if it really does need XX watt hours in total then it won't actually make much different to the weight whether that is obtained from one battery or three.

[Mr.RC-CAM]

http://www.bktsi.com/powerflite/mvm.htm

[steve lewin]

Wrong again eh, someone does make one :(.

You could certainly buy a lot of batteries for the price of one of those things though ;).

Steve

[Jeff Meyers]

What output voltage and output current is needed for the two?

[Vince inTX.]

The starter requires 9.6v the glow driver needs 1.5v and My brother wants to run the radio system at 6v for the added servo speed and torque. I dont think that amperage load is too far above normal for the glow driver and the receiver....the remote starter on the other hand is a complete question mark. Due to the fact that my brother bought it second hand and the instructions are scetchy at best. The starter is made specificaly for the motor he is using....a Super Tiger 2300 IIRC. the mvm unit looks promising if not so pricy. But at 3.5 - 5.5 oz the weight seems to be a wash if it only replaces the glow driver battery and the receiver battery.

Looks like if he wants the fun gadgets he's gonna have to pay weight penalty. I'm a glider guider and weight is always a concern for me. My brother has his feet firmly implanted in POWER and says he'll need the nose weight anyway. I can just see this thing snap rolling every time he pulls up too sharply and breaking the land speed record on every landing. But again I just dont see a way arround it if he wants those gadgets.

More suggestions are welcome.

Thanks
Vince