Recommendations for 6-amp battery chargers

[ChuckDickerson]

We have a West Mountain Radio CBA II that we use to test all of our team batteries as well. It can sink 100 Watts so the max test you can run is about 7.5 Amps. It is a really handy unit and I highly recommend one for every team. I test all of our batteries throughly before and after comp and rank them from strongest to weakest with big red numbers so you can quickly grab the next strongest battery that is fully charged in the pit. I haven't completed the post comp tests yet for this year but will post some results here if there is any interest. I have tests for 9 batteries from 2003 to 2006. Surprisingly, the new 2006 batteries are we got in this years KoP are NOT our strongest batteries. One of our 2005 and one of our 2003 batteries have consistently tested stronger than one of our new 2006 batteries. Last year one of the 2005 battery was junk right from the start. If teams assume that the new batteries they receive are stronger than older batteries from previous years they may be making a false assumption. In fact, it is a bad idea to assume the batteries you receive with the KoP are even any good. The CBA II is a really great tool to help diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of batteries. Another cool tool I use is a Medusa Research Power Analyzer. You can even connect it in-line between the battery being tested and the CBA II to double check the measurements from the CBA II. I have an older Power Analyzer Plus and the new Pro. The neat thing about the Pro is you can have it control your ESC (read Victor). It is a great tool to test current drain and debug stuff right on the robot. One other nifty little test device that every team should have on their test bench is a FMA Direct Servo Lab which you can get from Tower Hobbies for about $35. It is a really handy device for testing Victors and putting in-line between the RC and a Victor or Servo and to read and/or control PWM devices.

As to the original question of the post, we use the chargers that come in the KoP and some Schumacher 2/4/6 Amp Smart Chargers that you can get at Wal-Mart for about $25-$30 (IIRC). They are identical to this SC-600A model but sold at Wal-Mart for less with a WM-600A model number.