Hello,
I am redoing the power system of my robot that I built last year to increase safety (preventing shorts, adding emergency cut-off,etc), convience (adding master switch and switches for each sub system rather than connecting battery connectors) and bling (blue 7-segment displays that show voltage for each sub-system).
As I'm doing this one of the things that I thought would be fun to add is an on-board charger. I'm curious if any of you have done this and if you found it worth the effort. What issues did you come across and any words of advice in this arena?
Thanks,
CF
Battery Type and Thanks
Thanks OddBot, man you’ve got a lot of knowledge,
Because of the simplicity and expense I’ve been sticking to NiMH, so your charging circuit is a good start. I’ll read the link as well.
The battery pack I’ll be using is a 7.2v 5300mAh…I may decide to add a second once I get a good feel for how long it will (or won’t) last.
I have a couple of chargers that I can try to incorporate. My robot is large enough that I can bolt these on. One is large and has a built in egg-timer which switches from fast-to-trickle charge. The other is a small wall-wart transformer that I think must have some smarts to switch automatically. Or mabye it’s a trickle-charge only…Not sure, it came with the battery and I haven’t used it yet.
I can use my new emergency cut-off switch to double as a turn-on switch for charging, but I was hoping to make it more automatic. I had some-what envisioned the robot finding a plug when the battery voltage dropped and plugging itself in to recharge. Then sensing that battery pack as fully charged and unplug itself… maybe a pipe dream, but that’s kinda what I want to work towards.
Thanks for the quick response!
CF
