All right, it's time to talk about batteries. What time is it? Oh, my god, it's the end of the day. Okay, i don't really have too much to talk about today, but no matter. This never stopped me from making a useless video about batteries.

Let's talk but all right, all right, uh, please ignore the 48 volt uh rubbermaid, looking modules here, uh, i'm not ready to talk about those. But let's talk about this 48 volt uh module. Here we have a few of these um, not a whole lot. My people are still processing these modules just to see how many of the whole lot were this kind, as opposed to the other kind of rare, but today i want to talk about this, because this is very interesting.

These are just like the other ones right. I think 4s, no, it's a 14s but p. So four cells - oh yeah, by the way you can tell right here yeah here we go right, so it's four cells in parallel and then 14 in series, so 48 volt right just typical, 40 volt, really good for storage, but these ones, because they're so powerful. These batteries these cells - i want to talk this.

The reason why we're making this video these are uh vtc murata, which is the company that bought the sony branch of these cells right. So these are sony the vct4 cells they're capable of like 20 25 amps, or something like that and the interesting thing about these cells is that these you know that mars helicopter, that's uh, nasa sent or jet propulsion jpl sent out to mars, and it's flying around Guess which batteries the cells they end up using six six cells of the vct force. There's six of these cells that are up in mars right now and they're, flying that that drone? How crazy is that right? Um i'm gon na see if i can find the article i posted it on the on my group uh way back in the day when i, when i saw it but whatever, because i was blown away, i was thinking like what kind of batteries are they going To put this is about as challenging uh application, as you can think of i mean this is supposed to be in mars. There's a huge amount of stress.

I mean uh. The temperature changes are like in the hundreds of degrees. You know from cold to hot right. The the they had to survive all the shock, you know from liftoff and then from landing.

I mean it's crazy, the amount of engineering that they have to put in there and as as always, you're like what which kind, which is the obviously they have to choose. The best battery in the world to be able to fly this and to be able to right, and especially this one, it was uh. It's basically the only reason for this existence of this little drone to prove that we can it's a simple answer, so it doesn't even have that many, like scientific instruments. I think it's got some low res cameras, that's about it.

I think maybe some sonar and everything but like it doesn't have any other purpose just to fly around and prove that they it can be done. Maybe in the next iteration they'll put some real. You know scientific uh, sensors or i don't know something right so it'll do actually like a real important job. So this is a proof of concept right, but here's the thing these batteries.

These are not even the latest generation of the sony, vct there's a vct-5 there's a vct6 and the vct-6s uh do i have any here. I might not have any. No, those are not it. We used to have one we, we sold a ton of those vct sixes uh because we got them from some.

You know thing that a company that went bankrupt or whatever uh, but they didn't choose to do those, because these those were the newest ones and they weren't as proven right. They didn't have as many cycles and applications and studies and research and stuff the vct fours had been on the market for a while, and all that stuff has been proven that these are, i mean one of the best cells on the planet when it comes to Uh, the specs that you need right. These are, they don't have a ton of energy storage, but they put out quite a bit of power, uh and they're. Really, tough and the quality control is super like high on these right, like probably one out of a few million there's uh, there's a bad one right and so the odds of them having six that would survive and would perform really well on mars and another planet Was really high and so that's what they went with that right.

So there you go just a little background. I thought is really interesting. I know i'm crazy and i geek out on battery trivia and stuff, and then this time i'm like yeah, these cells have a special place in history, because these are the first cells 186. Well, i don't know the first ones, i guess right, but at the very least the first helicopter flying you know: machine autonomous flying machine in another planet.

These are the cells that are on that little device. So there you go uh. If you we have very few of these, so if you want to get these uh they're gon na be gone because we only have a few uh they're they're seeming like it seems like these are the odd ones in the in the whole palette or whatever um Stay tuned for other videos, i'm gon na be talking about those those are two kilowatt: they have 20 uh, 170s and they're, also 14s modules uh, and they come in this little interesting, uh yeah little boxes there that they stack and imagine you could do a whole Powerwall with, like i don't know with five of those you get 10 kilowatts, so so those are coming, i'm doing some tests, i'm doing some capacity tests we and so yeah. Those are going to be coming out and we're going to price them really cheap, so that you can.

We can just blow them out right. Thank you for watching these videos. As always, we'll see you guys on the next one tomorrow i'll promise to be more prepared and have a more interesting video for you, guys uh testing, some batteries, or maybe i can do that big one, where i show you how to install a whole power wall. I just you know it's so tough to so many projects going on there's so many batteries there's so many batteries and so many things to do with batteries.

I have it a hard time to. You know find enough time to do all the stuff that i want to do every day, but i try my best we'll see you guys next time. I hope you uh you find this interesting or entertaining at the very least right uh do hit the like button. I always keep forgetting to say that, because it does help the channel, it does help me keep staying, motivated and uploading these videos all right.

Okay, enough of this nonsense, we'll see you guys tomorrow, bye mars can get to negative 130 degrees, fahrenheit and engineers how to protect the brain of ingenuity, which holds its camera computing boards and batteries. The solution wrapping the box that holds the ingenuity's brain with two layers of this shiny golden material. We have our metallized polyamide film, that's our inner insulation layer and then we have an outer insulation layer by preventing those circulation currents from flowing you minimize how much heat winds up leaking out to the outside surface and you keep your precious components warm throughout the very Very cold nights beyond just keeping the battery warm engineers also needed to keep the battery charged. The solution was a solar panel.

That's our our font of energy. That's where ingenuity recharges, it's a rectangular panel and it's about a foot long. You know, i would say a little less than a half a foot wide whenever photons are hitting the surface of the solar panel, we're taking those in and we're shoving them into the battery you'll see three rows of solar cells on top and those three rows all Combine to give us all the energy that we need to charge soul after salt. One single cell of a battery is about half the life of a cell phone battery and that's what we use every single flight every single day, every single moment to keep ourselves warm to run telecom uh to to speak back with you know, mission control here on The ground and finally engineers had to figure out how to control the helicopter from roughly 200 million miles away.

So we have our solar panel with our little telecom antenna on top, and that is our link back to mission control here at nasa jpl. All of the data and commands sent here from the ground. We uplink that to the orbiters orbiters then relay that to the rover, and then the rover sends that to our base station, which then sends it back over to the helicopter. Everything that ingenuity does on mars is done autonomously by code and algorithms and the engineers at jpl wait for its transmitted data to see if their calculations were correct.

That's what they're doing here. This is downlink. We've pulled in data products from mars, 2020. A little insider baseball here, depending on the size of the data, we sometimes know how things went, we're sitting there at our stations waiting for the first bits and then the last bits to to hit the deep space network to hit the receiving stations here on earth.

To then get forwarded over to jpl once once, we've verified data's down and, and our pilot has confirmed that we've flown then we can celebrate and say yes now we know for sure. However, there are even some challenges that you can't prepare for after we were dropped. The rover took some very nice images of ingenuity and specifically of the solar panel, and we noticed that yeah. There was definitely some dust there that we think may have accumulated either after we were deployed and we're looking right now we're doing the the data mining and analysis.

One of the cool aspects of having all this data. You can go back looking at. How did the solar panel do before flight one before we really started shaking the system and then after flight one? How does that change? That is definitely one one of interesting aspects of having an aircraft uh. Is that you're not physically static? You maybe can use your propulsion system to try and clean off your solar panel, but we'll see work to go when ingenuity flies again.

It'll kick off its operational demonstrations phase where the craft will capture images and scout above the martian terrain. We've proven that humanity can fly on mars, we're trying to push that envelope even further and learn as many lessons as we can. Eventually parts will fail. It's going to happen right.

We are using cod's parts. We are not as reliable as the rover. We are not as reliable as a class, a mission that that's designed to survive months and months and months right, so it's gon na happen. We're ready for it.

We'll look back to these three points that you know we've flown. We got the data down and it's not a fluke. We did it. Five plus, however many uh we're lucky enough to do in the operational demo, so you know as happy as can be.

It's been a dream, come true and we're just trying to continue that as long as we can, when the operational demonstration's over uh, wherever wherever she touches down for the last time that that's that'll be where she stays in terms of the long-term future. She's already home. Uh, so that that's that's where, where ingenuity is meant to be, i can't wait to see what comes of this and and what you know humanity can do as a result of this um. You know the idea of being able to carry meaningful science payloads in the future, maybe one day helping the first astronauts that land on the red planet and we're excited that ingenuity has now enabled that.