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Last year sometime, I bought a charger to go in the airplane. It has
three outputs, with different current capacities marked on the
USB ports:
It worked pretty well for my accessory electronics in my airplane
while I was flying. The 2.4A output was enough to charge the Stratus
GPS/ADS-B unit, and the lower 1.5A output would charge my iPad.
Well, I got another one to charge the two devices, a newer one without
the labels, with the hopes that since all the outputs were the same,
it would be able to supply full output current to all three outputs.
Not so much, it turns out. Only output that can charge the Stratus is
the top on, and the other ports act the same as the labelled one. So
in other words, the unlabelled one is the same as the labelled one
just without the physical labels. Oh well. More recently I've been
investigating other charging solutions. (Both of the 3-output white
chargers are "Bolse" brand.)
One interesting thing I ran into while testing the newer charger was
that if I pushed it into the power socket (formerly lighter socket)
all the way, it would trip the breaker. Looking inside, you can see
why:
The yellow dot indicates the tang on the hot part of the socket. You
can see it's scored on the edge where it's touched the side. I
suspect that someone put the back part of the socket from a car into
the socket from the airplane. This is something I'll have to talk to
my mechanic at annual (which is soon). My temporary solution is the
red cardboard strip that keeps the tang from touching the grounding
barrel.
The reason that I'm getting the charging stuff set up is that I
bought an iPad mini 2 for my electronic charts.
Next to my hand is my
old iPad 1 that I've had for a few years, and farther away from my
hand is the mini. Both are running foreflight here.
I have a RAM ball mount on the bottom of the pilot's yoke in my
airplane. I have a RAM mounting arm and an iPad mini mount to hold
the mini in front of the yoke. Here you see how I've modified the
arm, so that the arm will sit up flush with the yoke shaft:
And here's the iPad mini on its mount on the yoke. This is basically
my view sitting in the pilot's seat.
The full-size iPad is pretty
bulky, but the mini is perfect. I can read the approach plate (as
shown) but I can see the panel and switches just fine. I've flown
four big cross-country flights with it mounted this way, including a
real instrument approach in significant IFR conditions, and this
worked great.
Oh, and another thing: The Bolse charger wasn't able to charge the Stratus and the iPad mini continuously for all the flights. Sometime during the second flight, it stopped charging the stratus. I don't know if it gets too hot or what, but the flights were finished under battery power. Which is fine, but I wish I could get a solution that would continue to charge for arbitrary amounts of time.
I realized the other day that I don't have any ANY photos of the
airplane in the last dozen or so blog posts, here here are a couple.
This was March 1 when I went out to the hangar and test the fit of the
iPad and test the charger. After two weeks of basically being snowed
in, we were able to get out of the house, but the hangars still had a
ridge of snow from it falling off the roof of the hangar building.
And just because it amuses me, a closer version of that same photo:
I love the asymmetric look of the nose, the landing light on the right
side and the oil cooler on the left. If you look closely, just to the
right (from our point of view) in the windshield is the Stratus taped
to the glare shield. The saga of the mounting technology for the
Stratus is another post entirely.