[Tom Line]

We went through camera battery issues as well.

We had problems with the IFI circuit. We had the program set up to charge when the battery dropped under 7 and to stop when it was over 8.5 (at least I think that was my last code, I'd have to check). It will attempt to charge the main battery with the small one when the main voltage gets low. We actually had many instances where our little cruddy yellow batteries were drained from a full charge by the main battery during testing from the IFI circuit.

Likewise, they don't take much charge to begin with, and the supplied chargers will nuke the battery if you're not carefull.

We ended up removing the charging circuit from the robot in annoyance.

A much better solution, if you can can stand to part with $30, is to go to radio shack and pick up one of the 7.2 hi-amp hour batteries for radio control cars. They come with an auto-sensing charger. Then use the yellow battery for testing, and the hi-amp battery for competition. The charge on one big one easily lasted us an entire day of competition running only the camera.

One other thing. We found that if you push reset on the robot controller after killing main power, it will stop pulling from the backup battery as well.