Power supplies.

[Velvet Leopard]

Hewwo again. I am in the middle of making the body of a walking robot for a little home project and I need to know a bit about portable/rechargable power supplies. What is the best ways to power a bot like mine? It is a six legged robot about two feet long and about a foto and a half wide and one foot tall. It has a custom made motherboard and processor on it and I need a power supply that can be recharged by wall outlet and/or solar. Any help would be cool. Thankies =^.^= The leopard smiles.

 

[pike]

a robot about your size would require about 12v. this is mainly to power the motors. An SLA (sealed lead acid) enough with about 10 amp/h would do. But this ultimately depends on the motors you are using to power it. So yeah i guess your going to have to do your own calculations.

In my case (mini war tank with pneumatic beebee gun) i need lots of power so i turned to 2-stroke gasoline engines to turn the wheels and generate pressure for onbord arms. Insane, i know !! But damningly fun !!!

 

[bmcculla]

Take a look ar RC car batteries. They can provide high currents and are still lightweight. Fast chargers are easy to get. You might want to use a separate battery to power your electronics; the voltage on your main battery will drop significantly when you draw a lot of current.

Brent

 

[Chippie]

If you are using a 12v supply, nicads in a suitable configuration will supply anywhere up to 30amps plus....they can be fast charged but obviously suffer from the dreaded memory effects......

Nimh's on the other hand can supply the same amout of power, cant be fast charged but dont suffer from memory problems........

Then there is the KAN cell.....typically the same chemistry as Nimhs but smaller and more compact, will deliver currents up to around 15 amps...

SLA batteries are a little on the heavy side, you must not discharge them below around 11v for a 12volt battery or it will suffer permanent damage.

 

[pike]

what is the memory effect. Does this mean that the battery has to be fully discharged before recharging. It's says to do this on my RC car.

 

[Chippie]

Usually, the pack is discharged to around 1volt per cell, so if you have an 8 cell pack, discharge it to 8volts, then recharge.