[Evenstar_342]

Mr. Skierkiewicz,

My team found your post very informative. Even though we've moved to the NXT, some of my fellow mentors investigated the battery terminals and found them to be just fine. Our rationale for replacing the batteries was the desire to keep as much constant as possible. Not being master programmers or electrical engineers, our students always had problems with friction and alignment especially. Probably some of the time that the robot was off was due to those issues instead of battery life. However, we felt that by having a decent idea of the freshness of the batteries would eliminate one variable, so we could continue problem solving more effectively. We were consistently underwhelmed with Robolab's meter, your explanation could account for several instances of robots dying at summer camps when the meter read almost full (I almost slept through that semester of physics though, so I could be totally wrong ). We're not complaining, a top two finish four out of five years is pretty good and, most importantly, we've inspired legions of students to discover science and technology.