Power Management Recommendation for driver stations

[ebarker]

At the 2010 Peachtree Regional the teams that played Saturday afternoon essentially had to play the afternoon on whatever charge existed on their Classmate. It was rough on the classmate battery.

When teams are at the driver station the classmate has to be running on its internal battery only !!

I would STRONGLY suggest that you get a dc-ac inverter, 100 watts or so. You can buy them at Walmart or a truck stop for $ 20 or so. Put an Anderson powerpole connector on it and plug it into a robot battery. Put the battery/invertor combo on your robot cart and it can keep the classmate topped off and ready for your match.

Then as you sit in queue Saturday afternoon you will topping off the classmate and be in great shape with the driver station. When you go to place the DS for the match you just pull the plug on the classmate and go to work.

It will cost less than a second classmate battery and you can use it as a power source for driver stations for public demos and to do a hundred other things.