Minimizing the setup weight and profile for power

Thought y'all might be interested in my homebrew power distribution I just completed today. I had four goals -

1 - First and foremost - since I also have an active music band, setup load and weight is a huge consideration, always looking to reduce weight and bulk. Same principle in portable mesh deployments.

2 - Build a power distribution system that I could use for two primary purposes
     A - AREDN portable node
     B - Our band's events, on-stage power (eliminate the 9V batteries and consumption at every gig - expensive)

3 - Assist with meeting or exceeding our NTX AREDN goal of full portable deployment in less than 30 minutes

4 - Make it chargeable from the outside, use ubiquitous Anderson power pole connectors and fuse each circuit on the inside of the unit

Here's I came up with for version 1.0:



The box is only 5"X 9"X 6" (HWD) in size (yay), poly plastic. The Raspberry pi is connected to the small HDMI touch screen display and is fully powered by the box. The Ubiquity works fine on 13 volts so all I did there was borrow 4 leads on CAT5 ethernet cables, with Anderson connectors on the other end.

The bottom right Anderson connectors are actually inputs to charge the battery. You throw the switch in the down position and it connects the battery directly to those connectors.

A look inside:


The battery chosen was a lithium polymer (LiPo) with many positive benefits over other batteries.

The inside has a common negative marine buss and the fuse block for + side. 

I have some buck power units I may add inside and eliminate the need for external bucks - for example for the 5V DC USB for the pi. We have a pretty large demo of demos going on in a special "Technet on the Hill" this Saturday - the Dallas Amateur Radio club is coming out for an AREDN demo as well as many other club projects - looking forward to deploying this system.

73,
Patrick KM5L
​North Texas AREDN group