I traveled to Flite Fest East (2017) this summer, but in order to fly, I needed to prepare my batteries. According to the FAA and many airline companies, you need to pack your batteries in certain ways. One of these ways is to cover the terminals of the battery to prevent the battery from shorting out mid-flight and filling the plane with toxic gas. Covering the terminals means to seal off the positive and negative sides of the battery with some sort of non-conductive element to prevent the possibility of the two terminals ever touching. You can see what results if the two terminals of a lipo ever touch from another one of my videos:
lipo terminals touch inside ammo can - https://youtu.be/3n09lcB0EbI?t=135
Here are some definitions from FAA articles regarding lipo batteries:
I own a 3d printer, so rather than cover the terminals of all of my batteries in electrical tape (electrical tape leaves behind a sticky residue that would make connectors even harder to pull apart), I chose to print end caps for my batteries. After some looking around on thingiverse.com, I found the perfect set of caps for my batteries. I used HatchBox PLA to print these end caps. I specifically went with PLA because I knew that it was non-conductive. Using graphite or copper infused filament would cause a short.
I printed this on a Prusa IIIP at these print settings:
You can also see that the print took a total of 24 minutes and used 2 grams of filament. This comes down to $0.04 per cap. Not bad! I was able to cover all of my batteries for the trip for under a dollar. Many retailers try and sell these connectors for around one dollar per piece, which is a ripoff considering injection molding would be even cheaper than 3D printing.
In conclusion, these battery caps can be helpful in getting through airport security, or for an extra safety precaution in everyday storage. I use these caps daily, and I haven't had any break so far. Just to be clear, I didn't design this model, DennisBaldwin is the owner of this model. Check out some of his other projects here: https://www.thingiverse.com/dennisbaldwin/designs
Here is the link to the model I printed: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:341517
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