With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Charging: going forward

2015 April 06 22:40

Last year sometime, I bought a charger to go in the airplane. It has three outputs, with different current capacities marked on the USB ports:

It worked pretty well for my accessory electronics in my airplane while I was flying. The 2.4A output was enough to charge the Stratus GPS/ADS-B unit, and the lower 1.5A output would charge my iPad.

Well, I got another one to charge the two devices, a newer one without the labels, with the hopes that since all the outputs were the same, it would be able to supply full output current to all three outputs.

Not so much, it turns out. Only output that can charge the Stratus is the top on, and the other ports act the same as the labelled one. So in other words, the unlabelled one is the same as the labelled one just without the physical labels. Oh well. More recently I've been investigating other charging solutions. (Both of the 3-output white chargers are "Bolse" brand.)

One interesting thing I ran into while testing the newer charger was that if I pushed it into the power socket (formerly lighter socket) all the way, it would trip the breaker. Looking inside, you can see why:

The yellow dot indicates the tang on the hot part of the socket. You can see it's scored on the edge where it's touched the side. I suspect that someone put the back part of the socket from a car into the socket from the airplane. This is something I'll have to talk to my mechanic at annual (which is soon). My temporary solution is the red cardboard strip that keeps the tang from touching the grounding barrel.

The reason that I'm getting the charging stuff set up is that I bought an iPad mini 2 for my electronic charts.

Next to my hand is my old iPad 1 that I've had for a few years, and farther away from my hand is the mini. Both are running foreflight here.

I have a RAM ball mount on the bottom of the pilot's yoke in my airplane. I have a RAM mounting arm and an iPad mini mount to hold the mini in front of the yoke. Here you see how I've modified the arm, so that the arm will sit up flush with the yoke shaft:

And here's the iPad mini on its mount on the yoke. This is basically my view sitting in the pilot's seat.

The full-size iPad is pretty bulky, but the mini is perfect. I can read the approach plate (as shown) but I can see the panel and switches just fine. I've flown four big cross-country flights with it mounted this way, including a real instrument approach in significant IFR conditions, and this worked great.

Oh, and another thing: The Bolse charger wasn't able to charge the Stratus and the iPad mini continuously for all the flights. Sometime during the second flight, it stopped charging the stratus. I don't know if it gets too hot or what, but the flights were finished under battery power. Which is fine, but I wish I could get a solution that would continue to charge for arbitrary amounts of time.

I realized the other day that I don't have any ANY photos of the airplane in the last dozen or so blog posts, here here are a couple. This was March 1 when I went out to the hangar and test the fit of the iPad and test the charger. After two weeks of basically being snowed in, we were able to get out of the house, but the hangars still had a ridge of snow from it falling off the roof of the hangar building.

And just because it amuses me, a closer version of that same photo:

I love the asymmetric look of the nose, the landing light on the right side and the oil cooler on the left. If you look closely, just to the right (from our point of view) in the windshield is the Stratus taped to the glare shield. The saga of the mounting technology for the Stratus is another post entirely.