Brett wrote: ↑Fri Nov 23, 2018 3:02 pm
Cable is never going to happen. Nor is a powered battery unit (a battery shell with permanent power supply).
We need a third party to develop one. I reckon every single BLK owner would buy one!
I built 2 powered battery units for my group's BLK360s. Considering the amount of scanning we did with them it really saved the field team a lot of frustration from having to wake up every 2 hours to swap a @#$@$ battery. I used an eBay DC-DC step down converter with an old laptop power brick + a 3D printed BLK battery shell in order to make things happen. One caveat is that you need to use v1.4.1 of the BLK360 data manager and immediately start downloading a file before the data manager checks the battery state. You'll notice I do this in the below video - just do it off the bat and cancel, this side-steps the battery state check in this version of the data manager.
We've since traded in our BLKs for an RTC. Thus, I have the 2 powered battery units available if anyone is interested.
I've worked with my brother on building powered battery units for other equipment like cordless drills and so on. It can be done and done well. I'm glad to see you work this problem. I was thinking of attempting this with one of our worn out batteries so we can reuse the battery Protection Circuitry. This may help with the battery check. Good hardware hack.
Super late to the party, but I would love to know more about the powered supply in this. Watched the video - for the 3D printed adapter shell, do you still have the file for it? Was curious how to go about building or buying if you still happen to have one of the units available.