Firewire 2.5 inch drive powered by HVX battery for offloading

M

Malcolm Wright

Well-known member
Hi all,

I'm glad to finally have something of substance to contribute to the board :)

I've had the camera for about 6 weeks now and have just been too busy, until today, to get around to this experiment!

I bought a firewire enclosure and popped a 2.5 inch 80 gb drive in it. Then I got a guy to do some magic to a panasonic battery charger (kindly donated by Panny NZ for this experiment). I only wanted to use the battery charger for its battery connector: the guy tore out all the guts and put a regulator that dropped the 7.2v from the camera battery to the 5v needed by the hard drive. He soldered the DC power cord for the drive to the output of the regulator and threaded it out of the charger box.

What I hurried home with in my sweaty hands was what I hoped would allow me to offload from my p2 cards in remote areas of the australian bush using a power source readily available to me: HVX200 batteries!

I can tell you right now that it works: I'm in the process off offloading the second 4gb p2 card to the drive, and it is purring away happily.

What I need to get back to you on is how many 4gb offloads the battery can handle while keeping the data intact. I'll be able to post that in the following hour, I imagine...

The offload takes about 6 minutes...

:)

I'm REALLY happy this works...

M.
 
Here's some good news already: after two full 4gb P2 card offloads, I popped the battery I was using to power the drive onto the camera to see how many bars it had left.

It had four out of four! It seems this is going to allow at least 6 complete offloads without danger of data corruption, probably more!

Final results in a while.

M.
 
Hey Stabwound,

I'd love to oblige, but I didn't do the work! I paid a TV repair guy to do it!
He charged me the equivalent of US $50... and I can tell you it was VERY simple for him to do. Just a matter of popping open the battery charger, attaching the right voltage regulator to the battery output connectors, soldering the drive enclosure's power cable to the output of the regulator and securing the cable within the enclosure so that a tug on the cable doesn't damage the solder connections... and then closing up the battery charger again.

After the fourth complete 4gb p2 offload, the battery STILL HAS FOUR BARS! It looks like this is going to work great! I'm revising my conservative estimate to 12 full offloads with no danger of corrupt data due to insufficient power. That's already more than enough for my needs in the field, but I'll keep going to give you the final tally!

M.
 
Most 2.5" harddrives consume a max of 1A, the HVX battery has 5.4 A hours. So you'll get at least 5 hours with that battery...

The battery powered firewire enclosure barry tested had a 0.8 A hous battery.
 
Anders Holck said:
Most 2.5" harddrives consume a max of 1A, the HVX battery has 5.4 A hours. So you'll get at least 5 hours with that battery...

The battery powered firewire enclosure barry tested had a 0.8 A hous battery.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I thought from the battery note claiming 5400ma/hrs but it had to be tested to be believed :) My drive only consumes 0.6A :)

This solution rocks... Just finished the 6th complete offload and the battery hasn't broken a sweat: still 4 bars :)

I get my DLT drive next Monday: I'll do a little report on how well that work flow goes.

M.
 
dpc said:
If possible, post some picts. Would be great to see for the DIY crowd.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Hey dpc,

I'll do that if I get some time. Thing is: if you know enough to do this yourself, then you won't need a picture - its just popping a voltage regulator between the battery and drive. The only reason we used the battery charger is because it is designed to receive the panny cga-d54 battery snugly :)

I forgot to mention: the repair guy mentioned having added a heat sink to absorb some of the heat from the regulator... But that's really it!

M.
 
Ok, that's it. Since 6 offloads hasn't taken any bars from the battery level readout. That's more than enough for me :) Just pop the battery on the camera before using it to power the drive, to check where you stand and then offload away...

Following the 5.4 amp hours indication, theoretically, with a 0.6A drive like mine, you could run the drive for 9 hours, and 6 minutes per offload, that puts us at around 90 offloads with a fully charged battery.

M.
 
If your going from the camera to the drive I think the max number of off loads you can do is 12. It has something to do with the way the files are written onto the drive. Of course I could be wrong. Its just something I remember hearing here or reading in the user manual.
 
NBCshooter said:
That's the coolest thing I ever heard of for a self-made mod! Take that, P2 Store!
Click to expand...
This isn't the meant to replace the P2 Store, I don't think. When using the P2 Store, I can pop my P2 Card out of my camera and download it to the P2 Store and still be shooting with my camera. With this solution, you would have to put your camera in host mode and it would be unuseable while the data is being transferred to the hard drive. Or am I missing something here? I think the breakthrough was the fact that he was able to use Panasonic batteries (which we all have), in the field for a pure wireless/mobile hard drive solution. I guess this would be a step up in portability, from using a latop with a USB2 buspowered 2.5 in external hard drive. But, the nice thing about the laptop solution is that once again you can use your PC Card slot, so you don't have to enter host mode on your camera, and can still be shooting while downloading the data to the drive.
 
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Malcolm Wright said:
Hey dpc,

I'll do that if I get some time. Thing is: if you know enough to do this yourself, then you won't need a picture - its just popping a voltage regulator between the battery and drive. The only reason we used the battery charger is because it is designed to receive the panny cga-d54 battery snugly :)

I forgot to mention: the repair guy mentioned having added a heat sink to absorb some of the heat from the regulator... But that's really it!

M.
Click to expand...

Here's an idea for those who don't want to monkey with the charger:

Use a sealed lead acid battery that is sold for emergency lighting.... I think it's around 6 volts.

I've successfully adapted one for my Sigma SD9 to bypass the expensive and horrid battery system it has.

The sealed lead acid battery is thirty dollars Canadian... or twenty five US. It should give even better hours than the HVX battery.

Check it out at the local home depot.
 
MrPolarBare said:
This isn't the meant to replace the P2 Store, I don't think. When using the P2 Store, I can pop my P2 Card out of my camera and download it to the P2 Store and still be shooting with my camera. With this solution, you would have to put your camera in host mode and it would be unuseable while the data is being transferred to the hard drive. Or am I missing something here? I think the breakthrough was the fact that he was able to use Panasonic batteries (which we all have), in the field for a pure wireless/mobile hard drive solution. I guess this would be a step up in portability, from using a latop with a USB2 buspowered 2.5 in external hard drive. But, the nice thing about the laptop solution is that once again you can use your PC Card slot, so you don't have to enter host mode on your camera, and can still be shooting while downloading the data to the drive.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's the idea Polarbare.
It can't replace the p2 store or a laptop because the camera is tied up during the offloading.

But for any mission where portability is paramount and continuous shooting is not necessary, its great. It is good for me because the situations in which I will need portability this year are nature shoots in remote areas that will be reached on foot: no need for continuous shooting (except time lapse, but that takes up so little space anyway - my 3 p2 cards will be plenty).
Really, most situations in which continous shooting is necessary also allow for the presence of a laptop...

As for the 15 partition limitation, I'm not sure but it seems to me that it isn't that big of a deal: once you've archived the first fifteen partitions, you can always zap them, right? And then windows should mount the remaining ones just fine? Maybe I'm missing something...

I remember 3 months ago I was worried about the work flow. It has all worked itself out quite nicely now, from my perspective. 3 x 4gb p2 cards sets you back about 1800 dollars, but give you 30 minutes of quasi-continuous shooting time in 720p24 native mode. Have someone offloading with a laptop, and you can last as long as their patience does :)
With a bit of luck, the DLT v4 drive will perform as advertised. They claim it has a 10mb/sec transfer rate in uncompressed mode which would put the backup time for a 40gb shooting day at a little over an hour. A redundant copy should place the backup time at about 2hrs 15mins. I can live with that.

I went out on a limb adopting this camera at this early stage, but today I can say that it is most probably going to work really well for me, provided the DLT delivers!

:)

M.
 
stabwound said:
Here's an idea for those who don't want to monkey with the charger:

Use a sealed lead acid battery that is sold for emergency lighting.... I think it's around 6 volts.

I've successfully adapted one for my Sigma SD9 to bypass the expensive and horrid battery system it has.

The sealed lead acid battery is thirty dollars Canadian... or twenty five US. It should give even better hours than the HVX battery.

Check it out at the local home depot.
Click to expand...

Good idea!

And your post made me realize I should make something clear: I used a broken charger that Panasonic New Zealand donated for the experiment... The fact that it was faulty didn't matter because all I was interested in was the connector...

I'd recommend you not do this with your working charger: I don't think there is room in the box for the regulator and heat sink to be added. We were able to gut the insides of the dud charger to accomodate the regulator and heatsinks, but you can't do that with the charger you use to charge your batteries!

M.
 
Great idea and execution, Malcolm.

We had made a battery adapter a while ago that accepts the DVX battery and goes to either 3.0V or 5.0V.
The reason we did this, is because we have a good supply of voltage reducers, that take a 7.2V and go to either 3V or 5V. At the moment we throw them away, as we have no use for them...
But maybe there IS a use for them after all!
The DVX plate is from Lenmar, and costs about U$5.00, the voltage converter does NOT fit in there without modification though, so there is quite a bit of work involved to make it pretty! :)

A pic:

DVX_batt_adapter_3V_5V.jpg
 
HD download limits

HD download limits

Hey, guys,

This sounds like a great solution, but didn't we have a thread a while back discussing the fact that the HVX will download only fifteen times to any given hard drive? Something about its linux lineage?

I've been pondering this same problem, something cheaper and with greater capacity than the P2 Store, and keep tripping over the 15X issue. Short of Panny's solution (the P2 Store) all I can come up with without limits might be using a laptop with a pcmcia/CardBus slot--and that couldn't be a new MacBook since they only have the ExpressCard/34 slot (and I've found nothing available that can convert to CardBus from the MacBook). Something that could read the P2 cards directly and save to HD, like Panny's solution, still seems the ideal scene.

From what I'm reading, FireStore and Cineporter seem they'll have limitations too. I think Panny has thought all this over and come up with P2 Store as the optimum solution, possibly the only long-term solution. Now if only the price would come down to something reasonable, $600 seems real, and with greater capacity, like 150 to 200 gigs.

For what its worth.

Carey
 
MrPolarBare said:
This isn't the meant to replace the P2 Store, I don't think. When using the P2 Store, I can pop my P2 Card out of my camera and download it to the P2 Store and still be shooting with my camera. With this solution, you would have to put your camera in host mode and it would be unuseable while the data is being transferred to the hard drive. Or am I missing something here? I think the breakthrough was the fact that he was able to use Panasonic batteries (which we all have), in the field for a pure wireless/mobile hard drive solution. I guess this would be a step up in portability, from using a latop with a USB2 buspowered 2.5 in external hard drive. But, the nice thing about the laptop solution is that once again you can use your PC Card slot, so you don't have to enter host mode on your camera, and can still be shooting while downloading the data to the drive.
Click to expand...
Oh, yeah.
 
CareyB said:
Hey, guys,
From what I'm reading, FireStore and Cineporter seem they'll have limitations too. I think Panny has thought all this over and come up with P2 Store as the optimum solution, possibly the only long-term solution. Now if only the price would come down to something reasonable, $600 seems real, and with greater capacity, like 150 to 200 gigs.

For what its worth.

Carey
Click to expand...

I think the market will force down the price fairly soon. Its only a matter of time before an intelligent card reader comes out that can copy the contents of a p2 card out via fw and/or usb. Then the only plus the p2 store will have is its safety mechanisms, and I don't think that will prove to be a sufficiently marketable advantage to keep p2 store prices so high.

M.
 
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