Power in the stands

[nixiebunny]

This is a good project for your electrical subteam.

Robot batteries are the best solution, in my opinion. You already have chargers and a supply of last year's batteries (sorry, rookies) to cycle through. Power inverters are cheap.

[Seth Mallory]

We have been using old batteries and a inverter for about 5 years now. It frees us to pick any place in the stands and not having to worry about tripping on our cords. We have even powered other teams laptops at the same time.

[theawesome1730]

Our scouting team has transitioned to an iPad app written by a team member (check it out here!) so power in the stands is crucial for us which is why we bought a deep cycle marine battery and a fairly beefy inverter 750 or 1000 watts IIRC. Its enough to charge 8+ iPads and run a Mac Mini and a monitor all at the same time. The battery will typically last a day of competition and we charge it with our robot batteries over night. We also keep a robot battery and a smaller inverter on our robot cart to charge the driver station.

[wendymom]

This is something that the venue has control over not the planning committees. It would be a major safety issue to run cables all over the stands and I imagine most of the insurance companies would have a fit.

[cgmv123]

We have an inverter with an Anderson connector on it. We use it with a spare robot battery mainly to run a monitor for our Chairman's presentation.

As for scouting, our stands scouting is low tech. We use wet erase markers and laminated sheets. Our scanner is located elsewhere in the arena where we can find an outlet.

[sanddrag]

With 8 laptops, a network switch, and a camera, we have not found robot batteries to be adequate. Also, it doesn't help that they shut off the power on the pits at night.

[Seth Mallory]

With the distance that we travel we can not bring a larger battery. It also limits how much we bring to run off the inverter so it works for us. I found that robot batteries are easy to carry up and down stairs.

[goofy173]

Sort of like 7 years ago when my company, Bayer Healthcare, was taken over by Siemens Healthcare. Being a big tech company I was expecting great things. We took a step backwards of around 10 years in technology.