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Start Up Promises To Charge All Your Batteries In 2 Minutes

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One of the most annoying tasks when dealing with production is taking care of power. At the end of each production day, you do the charging ritual every night to have a full bank of power for the next day. If you did not charge enough batteries, you’re basically screwed.

Drones need many batteries as each battery can only go for about 23 minutes on a 1:45 hours charge. This means that you need 5 batteries to keep a drone up in the air at all times. This is similar for cameras and heavier rigs. A lot of the weight goes toward big batteries that can last a long time. You need a big battery to power a camera, a monitor and some peripherals for a while, and you need a second (and third and fourth) batteries that can run for as long as it takes the first one to charge so you can cycle them.

Now Israeli startup StoreDot wants to change all that. The startup has a cell/charger technology that can charge a battery at 1400mAH / minute, and they aim to go to 1800mAh / minute  by the productization of the battery next year.

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How To Build A Wall Of Power

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Over the years, I accumulated a bit of an assortment of batteries. It feels like far-far away from the times where a case of AA’s would do the trick for everything and anything.

I am now a proud owner of several chargers, battery types and lots and lots of cables. Until lately they were occupying my desk and taking away both space and mental powers (oh! you know what I mean). It has come to the point where something had to be done. And I don’t even have that many batteries…. I wanted a solution that does not clutter my desk, be easy to manage, I wanted to tell full batteries from empty ones, and I wanted the option to take chargers away if I need them out of the office. I Ended up with the Wall Of Power. This is how I did it.

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Is Canon Planning On Blocking Magic Lantern ?

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A Canon 5D Mark III owner reported on the Magic Lantern forums that he is unable to install the popular software on his new camera, which he purchased several weeks ago.

According to the owner, his camera is running firmware version 1.3.3, which does not appear on Canon’s website and is not supported by Magic Lantern. It is also worth mentioning that the user states he was unable to downgrade the firmware to an earlier version that is supported by the third-party software.

Assuming this is true, is it simply an updated firmware version that hasn’t made its way to Canon’s support website and the Magic Lantern team, or is Canon aiming to cripple your camera?

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Quick Tip: Quick and Dirty DSLR Battery Strap Case

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Where are you storing your batteries? Here is a quick and fun idea from Instructables user hagay1974. Hagay is using two scrap pieces of 2″ wide hook and loop strap to make fold on battery case which would probably fit any strap in the world.

Being a 4 seconds project, it totally qualifies for our Fastest Hack Ever certificate.

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How To Tell A Good Battery From A Dead One? Bounce It!

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Batteries are a drag. They are loaded or unloaded, dead or alive and generally just always find their way out of their boxes and into to your bags floor, where they sit quietly and rot and destroy the bag…

Our usual recommendation is to use rechargeable batteries as default, but I always carry an extra set of Alkaline batteries as spare as well.

Engineer Lee Hite tested the theory that a dead Alkaline battery will bounces while a good battery will stay. Hite tested a few alternative explanations, including a test to see if the bounce is coming from released gas.

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Getting a Complete Day Of Battery power For a camera and Monitor for $150

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If you were not satisfied with the 9 hours battery solution we shared last week, Caleb Pike shares an even better solution that not only lasts more than a day of shooting HD on a DSLR, but it can also power a monitor for that day.

The solution is build around a (bit shaky) NP-F970 Battery Adapter which is compatible with Canon in via a similar adapter to the one we showed last week.

Now Caleb is pretty upfront about the build quality of the unit which apparently is not that awesome, but on the flip side of it, it is very budget friendly. [Read More…]

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