Quote:
Originally Posted by thelittlesister
The battery drops just from the time we take it off charge, put it in the robot, and turn it on. It will drop to an unfunctionable 6ish by the end of a match. The compressor takes a lot, but our battery dies just by plugging the robot in and not even turning the robot on. At comps we plug in the battery then walk to the field and by the time we get connection it has already dropped from 12-9 and we can watch it drop by not even moving(without the compressor running)(and we'll be disabled). But our volt meter will read something along the lines of 13 before it goes in the robot.
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Those symptoms suggest either that your robot is drawing significant current when it should not, or that something bad has happened to all of your batteries. Did they get frozen or baked at some point? (A frozen SLA battery will not have much capacity afterward, especially if it was discharged at the time.) Do you have one charger that has failed and keeps pumping current into fully-charged batteries? (We boiled a bunch of batteries that way a few years ago.) Does someone on your team have a habit of carrying them by the wires? (That is very bad.)
The possibility of faulty robot wiring is actually the preferable option here. Without a battery connected, use an ohmmeter to look for (and with luck, find) a connection between the power connector and the frame of the robot. Or you might just be getting physical contact between the battery terminals and some metal structure.