Batteries

In order to concentrate as much of the weight allowance that we have into strength, we decided that SLA batteries were not the way forward.  Whilst suitable for some designs, we couldn't justify the weight of the batteries in Storm II.  We would have had to carry 18Kg (3 x 16Ah Hawkers) to run the machine at 36v and deliver enough runtime.  We used packs of 30 3Ah Sanyo NiCad Cells, 4 packs were used per set of batteries.  The total weight of these packs was just over 10Kg - a saving of 8Kg over SLA batteries !

The batteries were originally designed to have active cooling from 2 x 60mm fans each blowing 37cfm of air around the batteries.  However after testing them the batteries weren't warming up unless we were really pushing the robot.  These fans have never been running during combat, and have been used to cool the batteries during charging when we have charged between fights.  The most we have ever pulled out of the batteries was about 1.4Ah our of each pack - leaving us with a 50% contingency.