AA Battery Packs

VEX IQ General Discussion
1

Is it a good idea to use 6 2400mAh AA batteries for a competition

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Thanks!

3

This is a legal battery for powering the robot.

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Is it a good idea? It depends on your batteries I guess…

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Oh wait this is the Iq forum nvm that

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But do you think i could use them for competitions?

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Please read Rule R13 in the game manual very carefully, and if you still have questions after reading the rule, post again.

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According to the rule I quoted it is legal for competition.

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We know its legal, but is it efficient?

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Weird question, but to further the science around this, I had a crack team of 4th graders take a pack, remove the cover, dump out the AA battery set and reload.

Test criteria was set up to recreate an actual event

  • 3 roboteers
    • 1 to cry - “Mom, this is never going to work” as loud as they can
    • 2 to work on the pack
  • 3 parents
    • 1 to reach repeatedly reach into the work space.
    • 2 to yell over and over unhelpful ideas (“look at the minus”, “work faster”, “use the other hand”,“are those the good or bad batteries?” and “That’s a G1 violation” to the parent.

With the precision of a NASCAR tire change team they were able to accomplish this task in under 5 seconds.

So very efficient! YMMV

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wow… thats something

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i meant are they efficient?

12

My take,

I had my AA Battery Packs die faster than the regular batteries, could have been the AAs I had been using though. Environmentally, no. The amount of batteries you will go through in a season will probably double your carbon footprint. Pricepoint-wise, I can get 24 for 20.99, making for roughly 3.50 per full battery use (100-0, which you SHOULD NOT be doing as anything under 40 has the chance to introduce inconsistency and all kinds of funkiness) At my competitions I was averaging around 6-7 batteries per day that we went through. On practice days my short ones I was going through 2-4, long ones 7-8. My team bought 3 extra batteries, (four in total) to use, ending us around 150 dollars down. A bit of math would show that for the price of the reusable batteries you could purchase enough 20 packs of batteries to go through 42 battery “packs”. In 3 Competitions, 22 short practices, and 6 long practices my team went through about 126 full battery “packs” (63 + 223 + 6*7). So for most teams, no, it is more worth it to use AA Battery Packs. In a pinch, if you need to test something and that is all you have, yeah that’s going to work. AA Battery Packs however are not something that you should be relying on, even stated on the product description.

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Just for a bit of fun and for anyone curious, if my team were to use AA Battery Packs, we would have been down 291 more dollars and would have gained multiple angry emails and letters from the EPA and our Environment Club! (Would have used 756 batteries)

In my head, 291 more dollary dos would make any slight performance gain that was possible with the AA Battery Packs disappear.

Like a unicorn, I’m off to spread magic elsewhere
-Blaziumm

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