I do panoramic photographs made up hundreds of individual pictures and I was hoping to use the Gigapan Epic to be able to scenes using very small angles between each picture, but I found that the batteries simply didn’t last.
As standard, the Gigapan runs on 6 AA batteries giving a 9v power supply. However, it burns through batteries at such a rate that not even a brand-new set would allow me to do a full picture.
My first solution was to get a 12v SLA battery and a voltage regulator to provide the required 9v. However, this did not work. The unit always shut down during its start-up ‘calibration’ process.
I assumed that this was some sort of problem with using a regulated supply, so I got a battery holder that would take 6 D size batteries to provide the power. This worked but only with the first set of batteries that I bought. Once the first set of D cells had died, I found a replacement set would not work with the unit refusing to start up at all.
Some research suggested that the problem might have been due to a lack of current with the original regulator and 12v battery combination. Also, the maximum voltage that the unit could take was 9.6v. A brand new and fully charged fresh set of 6 D cells gives around 9.8v which is what caused the D Cells to fail.
I bought a higher power regulator with adjustable voltage and current capabilities. This meant that a new set of D cell batteries could now be made to work by limiting the voltage to 9.2v and allowing the regulator to a pass as much current as possible.
I used the other 3 sets of D cells that I had bought and decided to revert to my original plan of using a 12V battery to provide the power because D Cells are expensive and still have limited power.
I re-connected the 12V battery using my new higher-powered regulator. The Gigapan started up and got through the calibration start up process but then as soon as I tried to set up a panorama the unit shut itself off.
When I put a voltmeter across it, the only discernible difference between using the D cells and the 12v battery was that the voltage dropped to around 7.5v during the calibration process when using the D cells but not with the 12v battery.
I tried all types of combinations of voltage and current to get this to work. I eventually tried reducing the voltage to around 8v and this did work.
After some further testing, I have found that setting the regulator to allow any amount of current and setting the voltage to 8.1v, you can run a Gigapan from a 12v SLA battery.
Since then, I have been using an 8Ah 12v SLA battery and I have managed to take panoramas made up of hundreds of pictures without a problem.