Testing Arducopter using a bench power supply

While testing the Arducopter I’ve seen that soon after the first basic tests with the Mission Planner and the USB, testing with a real power supply was needed. But I didn’t want to charge and re-charge my LiPo batteries just for testing on the bench. The same problem with the radio tx: it runs on 8 stilo AA batteries, and spending 10€ for a day of testing the TX seems a bit too much.

So I decided to make two cables to allow powering both the radio and the copter from my bench power supply.

I basically created 2 power cables, one that goes into the battery socket and one that goes into the radio power plug: on one side the respective plugs and sockets (a JST connector for the radio and a XT60 connector for the battery) and on the other side two banana plugs that go into the power supply.

Actually for the TX I adapted the one I used for testing the OpenROV.

As you can see from the pictures, the routing of ESCs/Motors cables and APM to receiver is still a bit messy, just as I left it after the last : I just wanted to see if everything was working before tidying up everything. Also I need to find a way to fix the APM to the frame and still keep some space for the received.

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