[Al Skierkiewicz]

Well,
Here as promised is a few of the battery test runs. The CBA II can draw down 7.5 amps and gives a visual display of amp hour capacity. It at least will allow us to compare to published curves for the batteries. Please note that one of the old batteries is slumping quite a bit and will suffice for while longer in practice at home. Please also note that one of the newest and unused batteries exhibits a reduced cell (drop of 2 volts) but in general the curve still fits the other batteries. It is interesting to view the slightly reduced capacity of the older batteries which may have gone through several hundred charge discharge cycles in their lifetime.
Although this method does not represent real world current draw on your robot, it is representative of the health of your battery compared to new. I believe these tests can be further modified by using a shunt (a parallel load resistance) to accelerate the current draw. However, the tested curves do match the published curves fairly well, at 7.5 amps the amp hour rating is reduced to at least 12 AH and the batteries are testing at almost 16 AH when new.