Does anyone have a design (possibly with pictures) of a battery charging station that my team could build. We really need to better organize this part of or competition day. I understand some teams build tool box style charging stations or charging station boards. I would appreciate any suggestions on the matter.
Thanks
Buck
Coach of Clockwork Knights Team 4300
well our team didn’t design one, we went and bought a piece of wood from local diy suppliers … hot glued everything in place … it doesn’t look impressive but does the job …
We just got an empty toolbox and velcro-ed a power strip and our 4 battery chargers to the inside. A larger hole in one of the corners of the toolbox lets us plug the power strip into another outlet with the power strip’s extension cord, powering all of the chargers. Above them is a removable polycarbonate shelf. The charger cords loop through holes in the shelf which keeps the cords tidy. We can just drop empty batteries on top of the polycarbonate shelf and plug them in. On top of that is another removable shelf that holds batteries waiting to be charged as well as fully charged batteries.
Bit of a chaotic response, but I hope you get the picture. There are lots of ways to make an efficient battery box, and it makes battery management much easier.
The search button yields all answers! This isn’t mine, but someone posted a thread about it a few months ago. It looks really cool.
https://vexforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=6619&d=1344387343
Thanks. This looks awesome. Does anyone have a tool box design they would like to share pictures of?
The cord on the power strip was cut off, and the 3 individual wires inside were soldered to the socket, which is attached to the back of the box. The socket came from an old PSU, so we simply use a power cord between the box and the outlet.
Just get some peg board and zip-tie everything down to it and but a surge protector on top so you only have 1 plug to deal with. That is what our teams did.
on a side note. how many backup batteries should a team bring to a typical competition and still be able to keep a charged set available? how many chargers? both 7.2V and AAA. assume 8-10 qualifying matches plus elimination matches.
My team is growing (third robot added this year) and I think we might need more batteries.
Thank you all so much for all of your help.
I think 3 sets of batteries per joystick and per robot is solid. Philosophy being 1 set in use, 1 set ready, 1 set charging. We also switch our chargers to the fast setting for competitions. We usually don’t switch backup batteries during competition, they last quite a while, but check them consistently and bring 1 extra minimum per bot.
We just set up our chargers at each competition, no fancy boxes or anything.
On another note, we replace our batteries before each match, so we have a lot of batteries…
Our team built a charging station from wood and aluminum tubing that charges twelve 7.2 volt batteries and stores in a standard file cabinet drawer. See attached photo.
thank you all for your imput. Looks like I will be going with the tool box model like 1492. Seems very efficient and handy. Thanks again for everyone help.
That’s cool. I should build something like that if I get more batteries and chargers…
I really like all the metal in the background… heaven 
Then you would die when you saw our things…
I demand pictures.
Okay But like some of our stuff (like our new aluminum) is being used in our robots, so our supply in that is low. We also have been looking at pegboards so we can mount our battery chargers on those so we can have all like 15 of our chargers running at almost the same time.
I wants to see pictures to 
Our stock of metal is all on our bot (mostly).
We just used pegboard. I will get some pictures on friday.
