Help with Prototyping Board

[ILAMtitan]

Originally Posted by Qbot2640

What is a "3S Lipo" and / or a "UBEC"

Can I not just create 5VDC from a stock adapter, or from a bank of batteries?

Sorry for not clarifying, I come from the RC world where these are standard terms. A 3S LiPo is a lithium polymer battery pack containing three cells in series. Each cell is 3.7V, so the whole thing outputs a nominal 11.1V. There are also other cell count varieties, and I've seen up to 11S which would be 40.7V.

A UBEC is really just a highly efficient voltage regulator. It takes a voltage input above 6V, and drops it down to 5V. So the 3S battery connects to the UBEC input, and the output is 5V. This 5V is the standard TTL value used in servos and motor control systems. I used this one becouse it's cheap and I didn't need much current: http://hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store...BEC_3A_5v.html

I actually don't recommend the LiPos if you aren't familiar with them. They require highly specialized chargers and can be very dangerous is mistreated. A better battery option would probably be a cheep 4x AA holder. This would give you enough voltage to power the UBEC and feed into the tester and subsequently your servo or motor controller.

This is of course the low cost cobbled together way to do this. If you can spend a bit more, the two AndyMark products that Joe Ross linked will be much easier to us, and likely provide more features.