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'Ello everyone. Im curious because I've found nothing about it in the rules, is it legal/ok to have a battery and a DC/AC converter on the robot's cart for charging laptops/phones etc? The cart battery would never be powering anything robot related other than the driver station.

Re: Powered cart?
 

Yes, the use of a battery to charge the driver station via an inverter is fine. It is also fine to charge laptops/phones from
it.

Be careful with the output side of the inverter(120v bit), as especially being on a robot cart, it could easily be abraded, scrapped and even accidentally cut. You'll need to be super careful to make sure this can't happen.

Something like this?

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ghlight=tablet

Andymark sells an inverter with an SB50 Anderson already attached
http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-0626.htm

Re: Powered cart?
 

Thanks for the quick reply and advice! Incidentally I have a converter I was going to use, and was going to buy one of these to connect it. http://www.amazon.com/NOCO-GC018-Soc...4M7 J8NTN6K16

Does it have to be an Anderson connector?

Re: Powered cart?
 

No, it can be whatever you want. Anderson connectors make it easy to use the robot batteries you already have though.

We use older, more worn out batteries to run our inverter, not 'competition grade' ones but they all have common connectors and chargers.

Re: Powered cart?
 

That product seems to only have a 15amp fuse, that would only a max 180watt power draw. I'm not sure the power of your inverter, but the fuse might be too small.

You probably want to be charge the battery with the same charger as you use for your other comp batteries. FIRST requires that all robot battery chargers have a SB50 connected, so yes I would suggest that you would need to put a SB50 connector onto the inverter cable

I find it is relatively easy to crimp one of the SB-50 connectors on to 16awg, I did it for some battery chargers last season, if you don't have the crimping tool you can do it in a vice with a screwdriver and a hammer and then fill the lug up with solder( to strengthen and guarantee connection), as it is only a low current draw application

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Thank you.