[Venkatesh]

At one time, our team had a cable called a high-octane cable. This cable, in theory, allowed us to charge one battery from multiple chargers. Needless to say, its use has been discontinued.

We are still using the battery charger we got in the 2001 season - our 6A charger emitted a cloud of bad smell last year (but oddly no smoke) and was disposed of. I owned one of those 6A chargers myself, but it too broke, in a similar manner. Both of these chargers I had seen had broken while charging very old FIRST batteries, made by Yuasa, probably from the 2000 season.

I have a question for the electrical wizards out there. How would a charging system be properly designed to charge multiple batteries at one? I would think a nicely setup diode layout would prevent one battery trying to charge another, even if there was a chance for something like that. I spent plenty of time last year trying to design one, but I couldn't get enough diodes for the purpose. The problem becomes interesting, because each battery in the mesh will have discharged differently, and some batteries are older/stranger than others, and have different internal resistances.