Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

  • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Out of curiosity, have the battery lives improved from older RC vehicles? I’ve looked at some current models and it still seems like they run only a short time, but I’ve not followed RC stuff closely enough to know if they’ve really gotten much better and I’m lacking the context.

    • June@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I race electric on-road and we have a couple endurance races we run every year. We’re able to get upwards of 45+ minutes of run time without losing performance from some of our high capacity (8000mah+) batteries.

      But we also run high turn (21.5t or 25.5t), and sometimes fixed timing, motors, so draw isn’t that significant.

      My Losi Baja Rey running a 3600kv (beefy, high draw) motor gets 15-20 minutes of run time from my 5000mah battery depending on how hard I run it.

      Run time really comes down to how high draw the motor is, lipo battery technology is significantly improved over the old nicad and nimh chemistries of the past.

      • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for the reply and insight! I suspect some of the models I was looking at may have had some lower capacity batteries to try to balance out the costs, and I was overlooking that.

    • slembcke
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      1 year ago

      Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.