I bought my DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and love it! I even bought 2 extra batteries and the 3 port DJI charging station so I’d always have a charged battery and others charging. Well the one thing with it is that with any LiPo battery that during high discharge the pack gets hot (No not like exploding hot) and when you’re ready to throw it on the charger you have to wait for it to cool off before it will charge (the battery is so smart it won’t even accept a charge until it cools down enough to charge it safely). A major improvement on the Phantom 4 batteries compared to the Phantom 3 batteries is that there are air cooling channels between the LiPo cells allowing faster cooling and also to reduce heat transferred between cells. Well I saw this and thought “Now if I could blow cool air thru these it would cool off faster!” And POOF the idea and final design of the Bat Cooler came to be!
I used a small computer CPU cooling fan I had laying around and cut the JST power plug off it and soldered on a female barrel power connector so I could use a standard 12 VDC wall power supply to power it. I haven’t installed a safety screen on it because it is so small I really don’t think it needs it. The internal fan diameter is 67.85mm so I’m not sure what that makes the total “Fan Size”, the side to side measurement of the fan is 72mm square. The fan is set to blow inwards, in other words the airflow is thru the fan, thru the battery, and out the oval exhaust ports.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
