Although I have many personal interests such as videography and photography. Some of my hobbies can often come from problems I've encountered. Upon joining a group my friends created to facilitate Radio (controlled cars planes drones etc) meetups an issue was quickly discovered. In order to charge batteries a charger had to be left near an outlet 700 ft from the area that we took off from, resulting in potentially hazardous batteries left unattended and far from us. In order to facilitate easier meetups I decided to bring the power to us. I initially utilized used batteries and a low-power inverter (which converts 12v DC to 120v AC (wall outlet power)).

This system was fun to build but its abilities were limited and with the prospects of more group members attending regularly, I might need a larger energy pool to pull from. I ditched the older cells for used bike batteries and an overkill inverter (capable of running 2 microwaves simultaneously at 2,000 Watts). These lasted far longer, but as more members came it became clear that I needed to build a bigger battery bank. This began the external add-on pack, allowing it now to support around 12 RC participants for more than 4 hours.

An image of this system is also on the front page of my website.

Through doing this I also got back into RC (as the last time I used an RC car was around my early teens years ago). I got a racing drone (pictured below) which not only provided power for the group but allowed me to race around while being able to recharge batteries.

This has led to the plan to build a reconnaissance and recovery drone, which is one to assist in finding crashed planes and such remotely and maybe even winch them out of the tree. Of course, this means I have another small project that will push my knowledge and skills as this drone needs to be capable of comfortably pulling an RC airplane out of a tree. A task that I look forward to.