critterhunter

I took an easy a dirty shortcut to power the camera. Didn't want to take it apart, so I just soldered a servo plug's wires to the negative and positive battery terminals (left side are the inputs to the cam...don't need to solder the right terminals up since they are just putting the two AAs in series). I can still insert two AAs and power the camera for other uses. Now I just plug the camera's servo plug into another servo plug that's on the 3V regulator, and then the 3V regulator plugs into another servo plug wired directly to the plane battery power (not through the BEC or anything). This complete setup, including a large heat sink on the regulator to keep it cool and noise isolation components, only weighs .5 ounces. That compares to 2.1 ounces for two AAs so the weight savings are pretty good.

With this setup I can now unplug the camera/regulator and take all that out when I want to run my 2.4ghz video transmitter and a CCD camera. Both are 12V. I'm going to try to run them via straight battery voltage as the 9-12+ volts of a 3 cell lipo should be well within their voltage range. I might have to add nose cancelation components to that, though. If I decided I need a 12V regulator I'll probably have to buy a switching type since linear regulators need at least 2+ volts more than the output voltage while switching types can take a much lower voltage (9V as the battery hits LVC) and jack it up to 12V. They run cooler as well.