Hello! Looking for some portable power advice/recommendations - I'm doing a second version of a project I made a few months ago with a wig that has blinking animatronic eyes in it.
Essentially I need to figure out a portable and as lightweight as possible way to power 8 micro servos. Version 1 of this project ran off of 8 AA batteries, which worked great, but as this whole thing sits on top of my head, 8 batteries was HEAVY and I'd ideally like to use something much lighter weight - plus I have way more servos to power in this version (8 instead of 2).
Any suggestions/recommendations? I'm going to run the Arduino itself off of a cell phone battery pack, but I'm really new to the electrical/power component of this and would appreciate advice. Also ideally I'd like to not set my head on fire by accident.
Do the batteries really need to sit on your head as well? I would think a wire down your back to something in your back pocket would be much more comfortable. Look into a lipo power pack. They are rechargeable. Depending on how long you want it to run between recharges and how much your servos require will dictate the size (mA-hours)
Well, "AA" batteries will be the absolute minimum needed to power your servos, but 8 sounds wrong as that would be 12 V. The servos run on 6 V, so what were you doing?
Your "cell phone battery pack" if by that you mean a "power bank" with a USB output connector, sounds a possibility but eight micro servos may potentially draw something approaching 5 Amps if they all move at once. You need to research power supplies for 8-channel RC model systems.
This is why I posted here - it will in fact be more comfortable to not balance them up there. Thank you - can't believe I didn't consider this myself in the first place!
Previously 4 of the batteries were powering the arduino and 4 were powering the servos. And I do mean a power bank with USB output - I think I'll have that power just the arduino this time around since I suspect the power the servos will need to draw is going to be more than it can handle.