Connecting lipo batter to raspberry pi

lipovoltage-regulator

battery:

LiPo 11.1v 30C 4500mAh

Raspberry Pi:

5v usb

I had a 7805CT regulator laying around and I'm pretty sure I can use that to regulate power to my RPi from the LiPo but there's one problem:

The only cable free on the LiPo is the load balancer cable which is 3 hot wires (one for each cell) and 1 ground wire. I tried to connect the three hot wires to pin 1 on the regulator but it started to smoke. How do I combine the voltage from all cells so that I can reduce the total to 5v? I want to make sure I'm pulling from all the cells so that I'm getting an even discharge on the battery. Thoughts?

Best Answer

If you think about how those wires are connected inside the battery pack, you will soon realize that when you connected all 3 wires together, you shorted out some of the cells inside the pack. You are right: this makes smoke.

Use the ground wire for ground and choose only the single hot wire that goes to the top cell. You will measure somewhere around 11.8V between that wire and the ground wire.

FWIW - you should charge your pack before you do anything else with it. Your charger will make sure that all the cells are balanced after the abuse you gave them.

Edit: Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams made the point that I forgot to make: you should consider using a switch-mode buck converter. You will be wasting more than half the available energy from your battery pack as heat if you stick with a linear regulator.