battery charger wiring help

[turbotec]

ok I am building a pitching machine. it consists of a 12 V motor, and a rechargable 12V battery. also to let the balls drop, it has a variable timer hooked to a solenoid to let the balls drop at my timed discression. my question is how do I hook all these boards together to the battery and be able to charge it. I dont know if I am suppose to run 3 wires directly to the battery, or am I suppose to hook them up through something. I also would like to be able to run the pitching machine while charging in theory be able to run it hooked to an outlet so I can charge while running the machine if I am close to an outlet. kind of like when you are charging a laptop and running it at the same time plugged into the wall. here are the 3 circuit boards I am going to incorporate into my machine:

TIMER:
**broken link removed**

PWM Speed Controller:
**broken link removed**

Charging board:
**broken link removed**

I dont know if I am going to need something like a power distributor or something like that.....please help me wire this thing correctly!
thanks
Lance

 

[Klaus]

I just had a look at the charger and am wondering what type of battery your 12V battery is. Is it suitable for that NiCad charger?

Assuming you have a suitable charger and done your sums re the total power drain of the boards being less than the total available charge current, you just need to connect all the boards to the battery (via a switch and fuse preferably). You can then connect the charger to the battery to keep it topped up as you use the machine.

BTW, what does a 'pitching machine' do? Please explain that to a foreigner :wink:

Have fun

 

[turbotec]

I like to play softball/baseball, so what I am doing is making a machine that will throw the ball across the plate so I can play by myself and dont have to have a person come with me to throw the ball. as for th ebattery I don thave th ebattery for it yet, I dont even have these boards yet, it is all in the planning process. but I was going to try to find a battery that would work with this board. maybe you know where I can get another different charging board?? and what kind of switch am I looking at??? I was planning on using a fuse for safety reasons! but I am unfimilar with the switch idea and how it would work with this application. also I dont know how to add up the power drain from the boards to see if it is less than my battery! how do I do all this! thanks for the help!

 

[bmcculla]

If you're planning to have a product that can be mass produced (as you said in your previous post) I'd recommend designing your own board. The stuff you are doing is really simple. If you come up with some schematics and post them we can help you with the design.

As far as the components you have we really can't help without some more info about them. What each screw terminal is for is the most important. Also the charger you selected is a trickle charger. these take 8- 12 hours for a charge. A fast charger would be much better, allowing the user to charge for an hour and then use the machine again.

Brent

 

[turbotec]

you are right I would like to mas produce this thing, but what I was first trying to do is to get one working, and then hopefully presenting the product and maybe getting some mroe people to help with it. that would be great if I could make my own board! that would be the most ideal thing! how can I make some schematics to post? all this is a huge ball of ideas in my head and I have been finding these curcuit boards that hopefully wil do what I want them to do although I am not fully sure how they work just know what they will do. I will start looking for a fast charger instead of this trickle charger!!

 

[Klaus]

Lance, have you made the mechanical pitching thing yet? If I was you I would tackle that first.
You may want to look at clay pigeon tossing machines and perhaps adapt the way these work for your baseball. It will be the hardest part of your project. Electronics is easy to configure to do various tasks but in the end you still need some kind of mechanical device to pitch the ball. The way I understand pitching is that the target for the ball is not very large and you want variation in speed and spin of the ball. Sounds quite like a challenge to me.
Once you have perfected that part, tackle the electronic side of it so it works automatically.

To mass produce something yourself you need a very reliable product or you get snowed under with warranty claims

 

[turbotec]

I have the idea for throwing the ball. the plus side to the pitching machine I am making is it is a slow pitch softball machine which just takes a motor attached to a wheel, and then drop a ball inbetween the spinning wheel and a fixed flat space so the ball gets wedged in between the wheel and the plate and is tossed out. I want to be able to adjust the speed so I can throw it farther and shorter as I want the ball to arc in the air simulating an underhand toss. I have a motor on the way and a wheel already purchased. by mas producing this thing I mean like 1000 units max to many softball people in my comunity. I was hoping to tell these people there is no warranty, but not offer them until I have used mine for a while and know it will stand up for a good portion of time! any ideas you might have for me would be great as the electronic part of this project is my weakest area! I emailed the people of each of those circuit boards for some schematics hopefully which I can post on here so maybe we can come up with a integrated schematic that would incorporate all these boards into one. if anyone knows were a rapid 12V charging board can be purchased that would be great. one more thing. say I do get these 3 boards put into one circuit board just for my machine. where can I get all the pieces for them cheap and where can I have the breadboard itsself made in a quantity of say 1000, so it looks nice like the ones above??

 

[bmcculla]

There is a company called PCBExpress that will make up to 20 boards (They have an associated company that will make more) and they are affiliated with a company that will load the boards. If you want to make 1000 you shouldn't have any trouble getting the parts for cheap. Check out digikey.com for small quantites. Companies like avnet and arrow probably have better prices for orders of around 1000.

Brent

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

This does seem rather like reinventing the wheel, there have been tennis ball serving machines available for many years.

 

[turbotec]

it almost is like reinventing the wheel because there are so many pitching machines available on the market, but not 1 of them can throw a REAL softball which is 2X as big as abaseball, and throw it underhand or slowpitch. and they dont make any of them battery powered. they make a few baseball pitching machines battery powered. so I could buy one of them and open it up and copy the schematics of that board, but i dont want to cheat and steal.

 

[turbotec]

so as posted in a earlier reply, I can hook up all th eboards directly to the battery, should I have a distribution block or something like that? I want an inline fuse of some sort.....