Need your help filling out a survey to help us gather information about VEX battery charging stations. Looking to design and build one of our own. It will only take a few minutes. Thanks!
If you build one and sell it for under 100 bucks that can hold 8-12 batteries, I’ll buy it ASAP.
I just made one with some scrap wood and some wood glue. It works fine,
We will post our solution in 2 weeks when we are done. Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. We will still be taking responses through the first half of the day today (7/13/2016).
We had a big flat wood one which seemed like a good idea until you want to take it with you.
So we have migrated from one big one to multiple ones in a Husky tool bag. 7.2V batteries fit nicely in the pouches on the outside. A six strip and the chargers are in the middle. Easy peasy.
Nice! Have a picture of it in action?
“Action” and “battery charger” are not words generally used together.
I will grab some this weekend.
Too funny! Had not thought about the choice of words.
I think it will be great for teams to see DIY approaches that work.
I have always just made a pile of battery chargers on the floor. If someone asked me “Would you rather have an extra charger or a carrying case” I would choose the extra charger every time.
Ha, that was always us too
I got around to taking some pictures of 91C’s charging station. You can see it here. Home Depot currently has the best price on these 17" Husky Tool Totes. Easy access and great assistance in organizing your batteries.
If you wanted to build a charger station, you could use your vex parts. Some banged-up fat c-channels to create a frame and a couple of standoffs to seperate the batterys. In theory, you could hold maybe 6-7 batterys. The only problem is you would have a mess of wires.
At first it would seem appealing to do this, then you have to realize how much cheaper it would be to use wood or some other material easily bought at a hardware store.
After seeing this idea, I grabbed four “12-inch tool totes” from Harbor Freight. Just enough room for 6 chargers and a power bar inside. 3 pockets on each side for charging, 3 pockets on each end for charged batteries. The July H.F. catalog has a coupon for $9.99 each (limit 6).
Nice! The one downside is not being able to see the charging status LED. That could be resolved by strapping the charger with the LED visible to the tote and numbering the ends of the cables.
Definitely preferable to a large mass on the floor.
In the ones we made, zip ties and Velcro hold the two sets of chargers, 3 in a row on each side, to small backplates of vex scrap which holds them to see the led and get to the switch.
They are smaller than Team80’s (12" vs. 17" long): no room for any tools or parts (which is probably a good thing)
We made a portable battery charger last year on a cart with a car battery. And ran like 18 chargers it was the biggest fire hazard I have ever seen.
Do you have a picture? This sounds glorious
I don’t think I have a picture off hand, it’s still at school but yea we had a car battery hooked to a charger which was also hooked into an inverter and then we ran power strips off of that it had like 5 power strips or something and we could run it from the wall or off the battery it got quite a few looks at the state competition.
Sorry about it being sideways I’m just too lazy to fix it 
