Anyone running their Electron retracts off of their ECU battery source? The manual suggests you do not share the source with the RX for obvious reasons. I ran a separate battery for the gear in my Rebel all last season and noticed the retracts barely consume any power in a full day of flying. Having said that, a separate battery definitely provides the benefit of a discrete power system from the RX or ECU. So, I ran the gear for a season to get familiar with it, as suggested by Electron. I noticed they react to binding real well (just stops at the point of binding) and do not appear to cause any adverse draw or drain from the battery. I even looked at their chart(s) which illustrate amp (p/wheel) draw when brakes are fully applied, etc... That plus taking into consideration that the max draw from the ECU takes place at startup, you would presume the two systems do not really contend with each other very much. Unlike a bunch of servos fighting for current at the same time. There will be 2 gear cycles which take place per flight (1 up/1 down) while the turbine is running. But the ECU draw from the battery would mostly be pump at this time. I won't bore the thread with the math, but if you look at the potential max draw figures from the starter, pump and gear, putting this max load on a 11.1v 50C/5K mAh Lipo should"technically" not be a problem. It should be able to handle the load pretty easily w/out breaking a sweat. So the real concern would be what if scenarios.

A little more about the setup. Jet Central Cheetah SE, ran it all last season on 9.9v LiFe, which I would switch to 11.1v LiPo. Specifically because both JC and Electron support 3s LiPo. So it would be pretty sweet if I could simply connect both devices to 1 battery using a parallel cable/extension like the one from DMP, link below.

Ok, so why am I doing this? I'm trying to limit the number of batteries I need to manage. I typically go to the field with 2 sets for every system. On this jet that means eight batteries. 2 x RX, 1 x Gear & 1 x ECU, plus 1 spare for each = 8 batteries. I can drop this down to 3 production and 3 spares, or 6 batteries. The caring of the batteries is becoming tedious when you have multiple jets in flight ready mode.

Thoughts?
Suggestions?
Lashing for such a silly idea?

Link to cable @ DMP: Dreamworks Model Products LLC

thanks in advance for your help, and sorry for the long post.

sc