Toy helicopter charging fix
posted Feb 20th 2011 12:00pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: toy hacks
[Onefivefour] was surprised that his E-flite Blade MCX radio controlled helicopter came with a charger that used AA batteries to recharge the lithium batteries in the flying unit. Yeah, that’s a bit crazy. He set out to modify the base unit to work with AC power. There are four batteries inside this base unit, one of them powers the charge detector circuit and the others are used to juice-up the chopper’s rechargeable cells. He took a 5V regulated charger from a Motorola cellphone and modified it to interface with the contacts for the three AA cells. Like the Magic Trackpad hack, he did this without altering the holder by cutting a couple of pencils to length and attaching the positive and negative contacts from the AC charger to them. Check out the video after the break for a walk though, noting how he still has the option to go back to battery power if he so chooses.
Talk about timing. I literally just walked in from the other room after using the exact same helicopter as this. I had always thought about doing something similar, but I’m glad i saw this first because I had no idea one of the batteries powered something different. Thanks a mil!