Canon 12V Battery hack

[Thalestris24]

Hi

I'm sure this (or similar) has been done before but thought I'd post it anyway. It's just a simple, quick conversion of a Canon mains adapter to run from a Li 12V battery.

As well as the mains adapter with dummy battery adapter, it uses a cheap boost/buck converter (a step down buck converter would do, I just happened to have the one I used). This can supply 2A, I believe though I doubt a camera uses that much normally. The only other item was a 2.1mm dc socket with flying lead.

I undid the mains converter part of the adapter and removed and discarded the circuit board. Within the plastic housing there is a central plastic pillar which I snapped off with some pliers. The dc-dc converter can then sit inside the plastic housing. The 2.1mm socket obviously connects to the input. No soldering, just screw down connectors. The dummy buttery and lead was clipped off the original circuit board. Removed a little insulation from the ends to facilitate connection to the output terminals of the  dc-dc converter. Connected battery and set the output to 7.5v by pressing the buttons - voila! The battery should last a long time.

Here's a pic:

Obviously the original lid of the housing just clicks back on (sans screw). I should probably add something to prevent the input cable from straining. A cable tie or something will do . Oh, I set the output to 7.5v which is a tad above the nominal 7.4V specified. I don't know whether there is any internal regulation in the Canon? You probably have to be careful to connect the right cable polarities

I'm not entirely sure what the true capacity of those cheap, blue Chinese batteries is but they seem to last quite a long time. I've used one to power my AVX mount for several hours and also my eq3 pro. But they won't power an Heq5, unfortunately. Possibly if you connected two in parallel they might but I won't be trying it.

Louise

[knobby]

Neat job Louise, did something similar with my Nikon and a convertor from Amazon for £3 if I remember correctly.

[Thalestris24]

28 minutes ago, knobby said:

Neat job Louise, did something similar with my Nikon and a convertor from Amazon for £3 if I remember correctly.

Easy enough! One could also use a 5v Li battery with a step-up/boost converter