Better Battaries for Driver Pratice

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by MaxMax161

It takes about 3 hours for us to charge a battery. Is that because we have bad chargers? Would plugging multiple chargers in to the same strip slow them down that much?

Okay, so "a bit" is a little longer than I remember... Still - consider upping to about 12 batteries. That will give you 90 minutes continuous, so about 2 hours of practice at a time, which is pretty dang good.

You want to practice with your competition batteries, so everything behaves as expected on the field.

[Bill_B]

I'm not trying to put words into Chris Picone's post, but here's what I think he means. Suppose you got a 12v marine deep discharge battery and hitched up an Anderson connector to its terminals. It might then power your robot for a significantly longer time than the regulation batteries. However, the increased size and weight of that battery would significantly change the driving characteristics of your robot by traction, turning momentum, geometry of gripper arm's motion due to its size and alternate placement, etc.

The consensus seems to be invest in more of the same batteries and practice with them. You'll also get practice changing the batteries on the robot so you'll realize how important easy access is to the power source. To this I'll add: look around CD and other places for ideas about how to make a combination battery cart and charging station. Ride herd on your energy sources. It's also interesting to note that many teams have named their batteries for easier and more effective handling. It's much better to say "I'm going to use Delta now." than to wonder if an anonymous battery has a proper charge.