Quote:
Originally Posted by Fej
I like to think that we'll be okay, but the next competition is on Saturday and we have 3 known good batteries (two MKs - brand new - and one Genesis, came in this year's KoP).
With that in mind, should we bother bringing down the charge rate to 4A or 2A or should we leave it at 6A during the competition?
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According the data sheet for the MK batteries, the max charge rate is 5.4 amps.
http://www.mkbattery.com/images/ES17-12.pdf
These batteries can get abused in a match, especially playing defense and discharging a lot of power. Charging at 6A will just abuse the batteries more and damage it more. I had a few batteries that swelled up from charging at 6A, I standardized to 4a a long time ago. Also in the long run, charging at a lower rate will keep costs down because your batteries will last longer. I have a battery from 2009 that still works, its not the best but we use it at competition to charge our pneumatics in the pit.
If you keep charging at 4 amps, you can keep buying 4 new batteries each year so at competition you will be using 4 new and 4 from the previous year. I liked this option because I felt it was very economical with my old team (we did not do the practice bot). Plus there will be a few extra old batteries for emergencies, demos or testing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by electroken
I try to keep the battery chargers set to less than 6A unless we're at a competition, then they're set to 6A. In my opinion, 6A is a bit "hot" for an 18 ampere-hour battery, but even with 6 batteries and chargers we come close to running out of charged batteries during eliminations.
I'm starting to think the "right" number of batteries and chargers is 8.
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I had to throw out a bunch of 2012 batteries because they were accidentally being charged at 6A. We increased our total chargers to 9 (so 8 plus an extra) and we have been doing fine, the batteries from 2013 are still going strong.
We have 9 competition batteries and 9 older batteries, a few of the 9 old batteries can act as backup for the competition batteries. Our system is to charge the pneumatics with an older battery and then swap to a new battery one the field. We found this helps in preventing the batteries from discharging too much.
Code Orange and us noticed that when we practice, if we adhere to a match timer and swap the batteries at the end of the timer, the batteries charge quicker, stay in better condition and we get to practice more.
In the long term (i.e. when we fund raise more money), I think we will be upgrading to 12 new chargers. I am considering an automatic charger that only goes to 4amps to eliminate accidentally charging at 6 amps. Plus practice time uses up way more batteries than a competition. I used 9 last night. I hope 21 chargers should be enough, right?
