Want to be the new popular person at the flying field? Well use this 12 volt power inverter to power all your friends glue guns, soldering irons, lights, well... you get the picture. This uses a 12v power inverter meant to be plugged in to a car cigarette lighter. With very few modifications you can make it able to use almost any 3cell lipo battery to deliver 110volts AC. If you are not in the US 220v power inverters will work under the same princeaple and would work just as well.
The inverter I used, at the time this was released, was less then $10 USD shipped. If the link is inactive the eBay seller I used whom I highly recommend is solarwindplus
Using this setup it would be extremely easy to unbalance your lipos or drain them to the point it could cause damage if you are not monitoring them. So either leave you cell checker or watt meter hooked up during use, or spend $2 on a low voltage alarm and save your batteries. I recommend the one linked below, even though it's cutoff voltage is pretty low, it will still serve it's purpose.
The basics that you need, plus some epoxy
This is the inverter that I used. It purchased from eBay seller solarwindplus. I imagine just about any 12v inverter will work, but this one was very cheap, less then $10USD
Removed the end to make the assembly as small as possible
Rout your wires carefully to avoid pinching and possibly damaging the wires. As you can see, there isn't much to the inside of the inverter. A transformer, a few capacitors and some heat sinks.
It may not be very pretty but if you wanted to you could hit your connector with some black paint but eh, the beauty is on the inside.
Easily powering a 40Watt glue gun with no issue at all
Make VERY SURE you monitor your battery voltage to avoid damage to your batteries and you know, that whole nasty LiPo fire thing.
Thank you all for taking a look and watching the video. If you have any questions or comments please let me know. I love to hear the feedback from the FliteTest community.
As always, Happy Flying!
0 comments