I agree I myself would never use the on board charger, I use a charger for R/C air-planes Because I build R/C air-plane kits, it charges LIPO and NIMH battery’s. tt will charge a battery from 3.7v to 12v but it is a little overkill for a Mameblock robot since it cost more than the robot.
What's wrong with my bot?
wildwingman
#23
I have 2 starter kits a tank and a three wheel model on the tank i use a 11.1V LIPO battery and it is rated at 5000mAh to run the motors it cost $60 USD and on the three wheeled bot i use 6 AA NMHD Batteries the NMHD batteries are rated at 1.4V so that is 8.4 V and it works well. Each Battery are 2300mAh that is 13800 mAh so they last quite a while longer than the LIPO battery and I bought 8 AA NMHD batteries for $22 USD and that is 1/3 of the price of the LIPO battery. And they power both the board and the motors. The little black ceramic rings on the wires work like capacitors to stop the feedback from the motors and with the LIPO battery you still need another battery to run the board.
srothe
#25
@wildwingman, the board can be powered by the LiPo, I do it this way. The LiPo is connected to the regular power-in of the board and serves the motors through thd board.
wildwingman
#26
Then tell me why the 6x1.4v batteries last longer than the 11.1v battery? And both Batteries are fairly new. The only way that you can test capacity is to connect each battery to the same load and time them to find which battery last longer, the problem with that is you can’t discharge a LIPO battery all the way with out ruining the battery. You can’t test capacity with a multimeter.
wildwingman
#27
Stefan yes that will work but you will have to solder a barell jack to the LIPO battery. unless you want to solder wires to the board, but i would rather modify the battery than the board.