Hi Everyone, i was raised a question today by a team who i help out, they are on a cheap budget and want to buy some standard 7.2v ni-mh tamiya battery connectors, 1300mah, basically they wanted to know if they could in theory use these batteries in the pits and use official vex batteries for competition and inspection etc … these batteries are £4ish from ebay and are designed for RC Cars, i said in theory they would work with the cortex etc … but the legality is questionable.
I would think that outside of the competition environment you could use whatever power source you want. I would worry about the cortex warranty being voided by a non VEX battery though.
I would not use 1300mAH batteries, they are probably based on 6 x AA cells, we have enough trouble with the old 2000mAH VEX ones. If you have to use non VEX batteries I would at least buy the equivalent 3000mAH version so you get the same performance and can use the same charger.
I would try to stay with competition-legal vex batteries if possible, purely so that you don’t get a situation where you’re out of charged legal batteries but have other perfectly good ones around that you’re not allowed to use. A little extra cost would be worth it in my opinion.
No reason you can’t use other batteries if you want to though, I agree that you should aim for same or close in the spec, with 1300mAHs you wouldn’t get much done between charges at all.
On a side-note, don’t think it’s been posted yet; don’t use those batteries for practice if you are using time on autonomous and not encoders, gyro, etc…
Using a separate battery will not change the speed of the robot by a lot but will make it go different speeds. Using a more powerful fully charged battery will make a noticeable increase in speed rather than using something like a 1/2 charged, or even 3/4 charged VEX battery.
hi everyone, thanks for the input, basically the use of these batteries would be for testing systems in the pits, like checking that motors aren’t burned out etc, and we use IMEs, OSE, POTs etc, but realistically probs use them just to check intake or something like that is working …
