Battery Life

[FarmerJo]

I am now the owner of a Robonova complete with grippers. Although the build was problematic it is now complete and I am able to run through the zeroing procedure using roboBasic etc.

I have one or two questions.

First I thought I read somewhere that the battery pack would power the robot for an hour before needing a recharge. I have found that after about 5 – 10 minutes of movement the battery is dead. It appears that there is a significant current consumption just to hold the robot in its normal inactive standing state.

Is this correct or do I need a new battery back. The one I have is a 6V NMH type 1000mA/H. Are there any battery backs around with a higher capacity than this?

I am considering making up a lead to conect to a bench PSU just for development purposes. Has anyone else done this?

[Humanoido]

First, RN should last about an hour with a fresh charged battery. You may have a bad battery or a charger problem. I had a charger that failed and was replaced by Hitec.

After your RN is functioning on a battery for about an hour, it's possible to make a battery substitute. I built one mainly for long hours of programming, and so I don't have to recharge the battery every hour. I'm not swapping batteries, and only have one.

The power pack I built is really cool. It operates in multiple countries on either 120 or 240 vac, depending on where I'm traveling. It consists of a lead acid battery pack (4 AA's) in parallel with a power supply. There's 2 switches, one on the main power located on a switchable AC power strip, and one on the battery pack. I can switch back and forth from power pack to power pack plus batteries. The batteries act like a big filter. I can run this on other robots too. The clean filtered DC power is great for controller board and servos.

humanoido