Has anyone made a wireless charger yet. use / charge / use / charge is getting a little tiresome and it is just my first week with ez-b.
Logic is JD Humanoid (or your build of choice) looks around when battery is flat finds a Glyph (that points in direction to head) and then goes to the home Glyph and parks with coil on breast plate and wireless charges. Seems to be some rough instructables to make a wireless chargers and some pseudo professional solutions
element 14 wireless
I am not sure if anyone has built something like this , logic was a script that continually does a getVoltage() and then looks around for Glyph and returns home to charge when low. EZ-B continues to monitor until each cell of the LiPo reaches optimum level and when charged heads off to play again.
Asked
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Is anyone using Li-Ions on their EZB's ?
I’m not able to find any reed switches that handle more that 0.5A
@jeremie,
What is the fuse rating inside the Revolution robots?
To be safe, I think I’ll go with the microswitch idea you first mentioned. Small ones are raated at 15A
Frank
No we haven't evaluated that battery in particular. The fuse rating in revolution robots is 20Amps.
Great idea. This is what makes the forum so great!
I’ll prototype this and let you know how it works out
Regards,
Frank
From my measurements last night my battery went from 7.558V down to 7.554V in 12hours. From these calculations it looks like the charger would parasitically drain the battery from full charge to 6V in about 300 days.
I'm sure that it would actually be less days than that but I'm pretty confident that you are ok to leaving an unpowered Linkman charger attached to the battery in your design.
Thanks for researching this
Frank
That’s a good point.
I’m pusuring this with several levels of increasing capabilities:
Level 1 would still require turning off the power switch, but would just allow setting the robot on the stand... making the power connection
Increasing levels would handle the shutting off the power switch and determining the end of the charge cycle to disconnect the power
Frank
Here is an update on my prototyping.
I thought I'd start with the manual stand approach as described by @jstarne1. The first problem is how to make a reliable easy to connect power connection.
I chose a magnetic charging/data Android phone adapter with some micro USB breakout boards
If you decide to try this be sure to order a cable that has data capability as you need the D+ & D- pins joined together for the center tap on the LiPo cells. You need both pins as the magnetic connector does not care about orientation
Of course this approach still requires you to turn off the robot power switch and monitor charging to later disconnect
Now I'm off to work on the suggestion from @nink and @Jeremie
Frank
Frank
Just be sure the cables support data transfer instead of just charging
The next step in my project is to add @jeremie’s idea of using another robot to provide the charging station
It is powered by a wall adapter instead of a battery and will contain the version 3 charger for the dockable Revolution robot connected through the magnetic connector
Regards,
Frank
I need the D+ D- wires because the charger requires 3 wires to charge the battery
This is because there are 2 cells in the battery that must be balanced charged
Also, I don’t think you need to worry about the orientation of the connector switching polarity as these cables are more the the USB C design where they don’t care about orientation
regards
Frank
Here is a picture of the 2.4 amp cable I purchased. There is 15 cores for data line and 35 for power.
Frank
Works well. I will add them to all my EZ-B great idea! Thanks
Great news
Frank