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Originally Posted by Toa Circuit
We're using the KOP chargers. (With anderson outlets of course) Haven't had too many issues with these. We do a 2 amp charge overnight (Treat your batteries right when you can!) and a 6 amp charge during competition time to boost the charge speed, and to 'top off' batteries. (I've noticed that a 2 amp charge leaves about 12.6 volts in the battery, whereas a 6 amp charge gets us to 13.1, even with two year old batteries. Our robots haven't been big power drawers until this year, though.)
Higher voltage (as long as it isn't surface voltage) is always better. Duh. It means less voltage dipping through the match, etc.
But if you're experiencing inconsistent performance based on battery voltage, You have a bad design. You will experience voltage drop throughout the match, during movement, so basically, if your performance is hinging upon a perfectly (not fully) charged battery, you really need to rethink how you've built something. (Though this late in the season... what can you do? Maybe use the battery reading in your programming to do something like an open-loop control, or you can slap on a sensor to do closed-loop control.) (This is my #1 concern with all these motor-powered catapults this year...)
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it's easy to say stuff like this, but in reality it's almost never the case. Having a feedback loop requires you to have overhead in power, which i don't think many if any robots actually have. Not sure how much you have worked with control loops but it's pretty much never perfect. We have tried it, and concluded it was a waste of time for our needs. It was simplest and best to just slam it full power, but as you stated this relies on battery state. Our main issue is our kicker. it's less about being 100% full and more about having a consistent charge so it shoots the same every battery swap we do. with a good battery off these chargers we can accurately and consistently shoot it from the white zone for autonomous, this isn't the case with our old chargers. Sure you're right it's not an optimal design but we don't have a bunch of control system engineers at our disposal and it's hard enough making a robot work to bag much less something this advanced.