Testing Arducopter using a bench power supply

I'm starting to build my Arducopter and immediately after having gone through the tests I could do with Mission Planner and a USB only I started looking for a solution on how to avoid recharging LiPo batteries every 10 minutes of testing, a especially how to avoid spending money on replacing AA stilo batteries just for testing the radio.

So I came with the idea of using my bench power supply for powering both the Arducopter and the radio. I basically created 2 power cables, one that goes into the battery socket and one that goes into the radio power plug: on one side the respective plugs and sockets (a JST connector for the radio and a XT60 connector for the battery) and on the other side two banana plugs that go into the power supply.

I doubt I'm the first using this approach for testing, but I don't recall seeing it anywhere, so I thought it was worth posting it.

Here more pictures of the setup.

A closeup of the TX power cable

A close up of longer cable plugged into the TX

 A close up of the other cable, plugged into the battery socket

I'm documenting my build process on my Drone and ROV related blog, so if you are interested you can also have a look at it to see how I am progressing.