My school is having a problem currently with many of our batteries not lighting up at all and not taking a charge.
We have multiple from previous years, about 10 of them, that have this problem. We searched up fixes through the forum, and tried a couple things we found. We saw about the use of another fresh battery to start it up, and it lights up and says it has a full battery, but once it gets unplugged it stops lighting up.
Supposedly it needs a firmware update, since the batteries are from a couple years ago, but we can’t get them the update without them being able to hold a charge. We were wondering if there were any other ways to make them usable again.
For the Battery Medic, does the battery have to be able to turn on the brain to use it, or is there a way to turn on the brain with the dead battery in? We couldn’t get any of the batteries to actually turn on a brain, so that was our biggest problem.
Most of the batteries are definitely over 5 years old, but not all of them. Some were from our stem teams and some from our lab teams, so it was hard to keep track of them for a date. For the last time they were used, some were inactive for years, and some stopped working last year.
yes, if the LEDs turn on when charging then leave the charger connected and also connect to the brain.
If you can never get any LEDs on the battery to ever light, use a paper clip and try the reset button on the back of the battery (inside the small hole). This is a last resort thing that can be done to try and “reboot” them, if the LED do light then to do not do this.
5 years seems like a pretty good run for competition robot batteries. Some other robotic competitions have suggested replacing competition batteries each year and rotating older ones onto practise robots. Leaving a battery uncharged for a long period of time will probably kill it.
Ok then. All of these batteries do not light up at all, but I’ll plug some in for some time and see if they light up at all. Some of the reset buttons in them are completely broken, so those ones probably have no chance of working again, but I will try.
It does make me feel somewhat better to hear that 5 years is a good runtime having about 10 batteries still working out of about 23. Though having 4 teams, one team taking 5 of them and almost never bringing them back, we just wanted to see if we can save some money for other pieces than batteries.