Reddit reviews uxcell 5 Pcs Dual Row 4 Position Covered Screw Terminal Strip 600V 25A

> I would be indebted to you if you reminded us what you did and how you did it. I love creating DIY gizmos, and recall your setup being a very manageable blueprint.

I suppose we can arrange that.

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TL;DR - 101 Ah Battery, DIY Distrubution Box w/ Banana Plugs, Mount/CCD/Arduino power cord converted to banana plug, 12V Laptop Power supply and 110V DSLR power supply hacked up, a few bits and pieces, couple of solar panels thrown in for fun.

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The long version

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• Start with the battery. Mine is an EverStart 101Ah from WalMart.
  
  
  
  What's important is that this be a DeepCycle or Marine battery, designed to deliver low current for extended periods of time (vs LOTS of current QUICKLY, like when starting a car) and be drained to low amounts of remaining capacity and recharged many times.
  
  You completely do not care about "CCA" - Cold Cranking Amps. If your rig ever draws more than 10-ish Amps or so at one time, you have much bigger problems than whether your battery can deliver it. :)
  
  What you're after is capacity, in AmpHours. I'll talk below about how to calculate your needs, if you're really wanting to be picky...but suffice to say, 50-100 Ah should be plenty for any normal AP use, especially if you'll be charging after every evening.
  
  
• Now we need a way to distribute all that power. I built this one myself. Start with a suitable project box, grab a fuse holder (I use a 10A fuse btw), maybe a terminal block for easy connections to the input power, and some banana jacks and wire it all up with some 14 or 16 gauge speaker wire, and you're set.
  
  Mine has banana plugs on the input side, so I can plug it into my 12V power supply when I'm at home. When i'm in the field, I have some battery clips that you can plug banana plugs into like these, but you can also rig up your own if you wish with some simple 3/16" brass tubing and some solder. :)
  
  
• Then we've got a bunch of cables. Nothing really surprising there...it's just the various power cables for the mount, the CCD, and so on, with all their various connectors (usually cigarette lighter plugs) removed, and replaced with banana plugs.
  
  
• Next is laptop power. This is the result of hacking apart a 12V laptop power supply (That company makes more, for several different breeds of laptop) and stuffing the guts into a small project box. Isolated the input power inside the guts, and connected it to some banana plugs.
  
  BE VERY CAREFUL HERE The company that makes these uses black for negative, and red for positive. Great way to get confused and short your power supply, etc.
  
  
• Finally, the DSLR Power for when i'm shooting planetary/lunar. This one takes the most "hacking". You start with an AC power adapter for your DSLR. All you really need is the camera end...the plug, and the little adapter bit shaped like a battery. In fact, sometimes you can buy them seperately, though they're often as much or more than the whole power unit.
  
  Next, read the power supply to see what its output is (or use a multimeter to find out). It is a pretty safe bet it'll be 7.4V, since that's the output of a 2-cell lithium pack, which is what most of them are these days, but check and be sure.
  
  The, grab yourself a little step down module (You can find those in packs of 10 or more for less per piece if you think you need extras for other projects), These guys are slick....just hook up your power supply and a voltmeter, twist the little gold screw to adjust output power, and when it gets to 7.4V (or whatever your DSLR needs) you're all set.
  
  Clip off the output cable and plug from the DSLR power adapter, solder that onto the output side of the step down module, hook up some banana plugs to the input side...done. 12V DSLR power for the night.
  
  
• Finally, because it seemed fun, I grabbed some good monocrystaline solar panels and a charge controller, and rigged up a little wood frame I can set up
  next to the RV. No picture, I'm too lazy to drag them out of the RV storage. heh I do want to be clear, though...having some solar recharging capacity is not necessary at all unless you're just crushing this rig for power (see below), but it IS pretty cool and gadgety if you're into such things. :)
  
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• Ok, smartass, how much power do I actually need?
  
  Easy...you need the number of amps your rig pulls, times the number of hours you'll be using it, times the number of times you want to use it between charges, times 1.5
  
  The two biggest consumers in a typical AP rig will be the laptop and the cooler on a CCD if you have one. DSLRs, focusers, tracking mounts, etc...None of these things use much power at all, and they use VERY little on a constant basis.
  
  Best way to know for sure is simply to use a multimeter to measure the current each one is using under its highest load. In other words, measure the mount while it's slewing, the CCD while it's cooling, the laptop while it's screen is on and drives aren't sleeping and battery is charging, etc.
  
  Add all those up, that's your current needs....you need to be able to provide that many amps at any given time. (That number almost CERTAINLY ought to be under 10A, hence the suggestion of a 10A fuse above).
  
  Now...multiply that number by the number of hours you'll be running the rig. Say you pull 5A, and will be imaging for 6 hours. That's 30AH of capacity you'll use (if everything's running at max).
  
  Now..maybe you want to be able to go camping for a weekend, and not recharge...so you want to shoot for 2 nights. Ok. 30Ah 2 = 60Ah.
  
  And finally, give yourself a nice cushion, so you don't drain the battery completely (a deep cycle CAN handle it..but they still don't "like" it). Let's say 1.5 times the need, so 60 1.5, 90Ah.
  
  You can quite comfortably figure on a 90Ah battery getting you two full nights of use, with no worries. :)
  
  For what it's worth :
  
  I run a cooled CCD, a Losmandy G11 mount, a Toshiba laptop, an Arduino-based focuser, AND support my son and I recharging our RC batteries (various 1.8Ah - 4 Ah capacity 2-6 cell packs) all off the same 101Ah battery. We can pull a complete weekend (leave on Friday afternoon, image Fri/Sat nights, fly Sat/Sun day) RC/Imaging camping trip and come home with about 20-30% capacity left in the battery. With the solar rig added on, we could go 4-5 days or more, depending on sunlight. I did my recent 3 night imaging trip with the same battery, and wasn't even down to half-empty when i got home.
  
  

Sure do.

Terminal Blocks

4 Conductor Wire

You can pretty much do as you wish. You can normally put 2 or more wires in those clamp down terminals.

In my day, we'd use something like this to connect up our circuit.