pic: Battery Charging Station (571)

[Steve Howland]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

Wow.
Does it do AAs too?

No - net yet anyway!
A lot of people on my time have put a lot of time into the design and building of this cart and it is very useful for teams that may want to build their own. We use 6 regular chargers with the silver connectors inside the red battery connectors, but we add on another set of wires to the silver pieces before the are crimped and placed in. These wires are then sent through a voltmeter (after a set of male and female connectors so that the chargers can be removed for travel, etc.). These are the numbers appearing underneath each charger in the picture. We have found this feature to be especially useful during elmination rounds because we run through batteries so quickly that sometimes it is hard to know which one has the most power (If you are planning on building one yourself, then it should be noted that when determining the most charged battery then the chargers should be switched off, otherwise the charger's flow of electricity will be measured and not the battery itself).

We have recently installed a battery load tester and perhaps we can get that updated in the white pages soon. If you have any questions please let me know and I can talk to the engineers or the other major battery student on our team.
-Diobsidian