 Today, we want to know can you fly this with these one on the road a ride? I'm the drip. I'm Joshua Bart. Well, and I'm your boy vortex and today We are seeing if we can fly one of our FPV freestyle drones with AA batteries Legit. This is not a prank. These are not secretly lithium batteries. We're gonna really try to do this I came across this YouTube channel They had this beater car and they were trying to see like what could they put in the gas tank get the car to Run, so I was thinking okay. What's the analogy here? And I thought I can a drone run on double a batteries just to see if we could do it We just bought a couple packs of these Duracell These are supposed to have extra life extra power, but will it be enough to fly to fly? So normally we power our drones with a lithium polymer battery that's designed specifically for powering a drone. These are very high output batteries Just a lot more battery per gram of weight double a batteries not really the same. They're cheaper and they don't explode Last forever remote control. What's the difference between this and this and not in terms of chemistry necessarily But in terms of like practical, can you fly a drone with one of these? Here's one difference If we measure the lipo one cell of the lipo is I got that one at 3.85 volts That's its storage voltage. It'll go up to 4.2 volts when it's fully charged and one cell This battery is essentially like if you had one two three four of these guys sort of okay So this is a four s four s that's four series That means you've got four individual cells in series each cell has a voltage and when you stack them together There you go 15.3. Okay, so our drone packs when we get these They're meant to be charged and discharged over and over so they come at like a storage voltage And then we would charge them up to 4.2 volts per cell and for a four cell battery that be 16.8 volts these store-bought double a batteries. They're supposed to come fully charged. They come fully charged You're not supposed to recharge them and oh my god one point seven one point seven Okay, so difference half four. Yeah, it's about half. So a four cell double a battery would be about So now you've basically made a four series double a battery. Yeah, we're about five Volts Got it. Here's the first problem. We got to solve. It's not promising these motors are designed to run on 1714 15 volts we got to get these guys up to 15. There are three characteristics of the battery We got to think out one is voltage number two is capacity. How many milliamp hours the battery I don't even know if they list that how much they don't so we could actually I mean Theoretically we could discharge one of these slowly and see how many milliamp hours it discharges That's flight time. How long can we fly but then the third characteristic is c-rate c-rate is how much current it can provide instantaneously without and it has to do with the capacity right so let's say this battery has a 70c rating and it's a 1300 milliamp hour capacity battery 1.3 times 70 about a hundred about yeah, so Theoretically a 70c battery ratings are usually will I think you pull 100 amps on this you're getting an explosion Here's the problem. These guys are not designed for high although these guys are supposed to be extra power I don't think they mean it like we mean it and they don't have a very high capacity one more There's a fourth factor where these are different. What's that? We're only gonna get one flight. Anyways, cuz you can't recharge it Wow, no, we're gonna charge it You can listen you can't you can recharge any battery. It's just should we won't be recharging these because when we're done with them I think they will explode. You think it's gonna explode. There's two ways we can approach this We can approach this scientifically like we could test the capacity and the c-rate right do we get just bench build a freaking battery And try and fly a drone with it all in favor. I want to just build a battery build the battery We've got a scale here to give us an idea of what we can expect let's see what a 1300 milliamp hour lipo ways that's about 138 grams Let's see what happens when we put 10 double a battery about 240 grams. You know what? We'll just remove the GoPro think about all the way. That's true. You might look at that We're gonna take the GoPro off. There we go. There's 120 grams right there. So now we're basically weight parity We'll see how these guys compare to this lipo Even arm I guarantee you when we plug it in it'll go do do do okay Guarantee you it'll power up Will it even arm and spin the motors? I think I will for sure spin the motors for sure I'm worried it might when you give it full throttle just reset. You know the voltage might just sag if the voltage Sags to the point where the whole quad just shuts down Then the batteries won't explode. That's is an upside. We got a 17 It will stay in your closet for years and years and years and still have a charge this one now That's true. That's it. I want to this thing and we gotta go Oh my god Rookie mistake Johnson So plugging in double-a batteries in three two one. Oh My gosh, I do not oh I have video. Why did the motors do that? Why do they go beep beep beep beep because it was had to connect first. Okay? Okay? Okay? Okay, we've got really arm and will the motors spin? Oh my gosh, I'm not putting a tail in nope. Oh So what happened was I gave it throttle and then all of a sudden it just died the video cut out So it just kind of like reset on the voltage sagged out The voltage sagged down and I don't think the regulator could keep up So it reset the video unit and I mean they spooled up though. Okay. Hang on I have an idea. I want to know how many amps you're pulling if this thing will do it. Okay? One amp two amps Three six amps, okay? But that and that's six amps on top of whatever they're resting so seven amps and we're at 16 volts So we've we dropped it basically a whole volt. That's not too bad. We need a bigger battery We do need to be I think this actually has viability. What if we give it more voltage? What if we made it like equivalent to a five-cell? I mean at the end of the day I don't think the voltage I mean if we go serial or parallel at the end of the day what we need is watts Mm-hmm. I don't think I think if you go higher voltage on high KV the motors become less efficient So let's just make more packs in parallel. Let's make two more of these packs We have enough batteries to make two more of these packs Here we go plugging in in three two one Yeah I mean we have we got to have twice as many amps now in the quad three two one Oh boy All right, I'm gonna take off in three two Lifted but then the same thing. Oh So that still didn't work. We got a lot closer. We have the original battery We're just gonna use this parallel connector for making it plug it in real quick. We have now three in parallel Here's the problem. Actually, I'm kind of curious to try this So we'll just set it up like this and see if you can even get this to lift so you won't be lifting That's interesting. We won't be adding weight. We will be adding power Oh, I think it's definitely gonna lift it almost got in the air Hold on hold on. Let me see if I can control the throttle to bring it into a hover I just So it definitely isn't gonna lift off with a third back attached. So boys and girls This is why we use lithium polymer and not Regular alkaline store-bought batteries. How can we make the video a winner though? How can we make a quad fly with AA batteries? Hi, my name is Sam Pankratz. I'm a junior in aerospace engineering here at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville I've been flying RC for about six years and I have successfully flown a mini quad on AA batteries A few months ago I talked to Drew and he said that if you can fly a quad on AA batteries We'll film a video about it. I was like, well, I think I have the tools I think I have the knowledge base to make that happen So what I think the rotor riot guys got wrong before is that they Didn't use proper nickel metal hydride batteries the batteries that I use were spot welded So you don't damage the chemistry. They were properly cycled and pretty well built I think another problem was that they only tried five inch propellers If you go to the six inch you can hover at a lower current draw Which is really important to flying with terrible chemistry What I really wanted to do is to be able to take off hover Do a roll or a flip catch it and then land So then I built this six inch that has nothing extra on it. There's no top plate. There's no fpv equipment It's just motors or receiver fly controller esc and frame and then I built a parallel connector because I tried with one battery and that didn't work. So I tried with another battery and that actually worked So this is this is not feasible. This is a terrible idea But it can kind of work. All right, so I'm here with Sean and Alex and we're going to fly What sam has put together for us? So this actually started about two years ago We had this stupid idea to try and fly a drone with doubly batteries And thanks to sam so following his recommendations. Sean has put together something here So this is a six inch drone 24 50 kv motors Normally for a 17 volt battery with six inch props that'd be over propped and you'd run the risk of burning out the motors We I don't think we're gonna burn out the motors. I think we're still gonna be struggling to fly this thing That was full throttle I can't even arm it now don't know why it's not working. I saw the video of it flying with sam I'm just overcharging him now. I got on plug it. It's sizzling. It's sizzling. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go It's sizzling good. Let's go. Let's go Oh, is it seriously a loose problem ever got us? It was starting to make some noises on the charger Well, I gotta be quick to boom. I understand you might need to be quick to boom boom This might I actually think this will catch on fire Make sure you give it power before you like We'll just roll it off. It's got no power I'm shooting it yeah The video I think oh my god. It is so hot. Yeah, it's toasty I think I can do it So I'm gonna get altitude and then I'm gonna lower throttle not chop throttle So you can't do anything about I'm gonna lower throttle and just give a roll not full stick roll You gotta like you got a baby Three two one We did the roll you just gotta do the PV roll on AA batteries. Just nice get it slow You gotta do it. You just hit the ground after the roll. That's my style, baby That was kind of uncalled for