So our batteries are starting to when they are full charge to justgive out when driving and die. And this red light starts blinking. Any clue what to do. We are down to 4 batteries and we have 4 teams competing this weekend.
Here is a picture
First thing, run the battery medic. See this article: https://kb.vex.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035590212-Using-the-V5-Battery-Medic
That means that the battery is dead. If it isn’t charging try to plug it in on a different outlet than the one you used. If that doesn’t work try reaching out to some local teams to borrow or buy a couple of batteries/chargers.
How old are your batteries because they could be old and not be able to hold their charge if they’re very old. If they have been wet before they could have messed up the insides. If they are new I don’t know why they are doing this and you might want to send them back to Vex and order new ones.
They are 4 years old right now i am running the medic and about 8 seem good out of 12 will see if they work
yea; my school calls it a “trick batter” i do recommend the batter medic also mentioned by @kmmohn it will at least tell you what is going on with it(from my understanding of what it does based on what my teamates told me)
My school calls it the Red Dot Rona (this was during the corona when literally every single battery did this). Our school has had this problem for as long as I have been in VEX, and I have spend 10+ hours trying to figure out what went wrong (I came to the conclusion it was only us that had this problem, but I guess not). I haven’t found a way to fix them once they get it, but I updated all of our batteries firmware and we haven’t had one since
1 cause could be the battery cord. 1 of our batteries got the Red Dot Rona at the start of the year and we tested another and it also got it, we finally tested 1 more battery that we knew 100% worked, and it failed. We replaced the cord and since then it’s been fine. My advice is get a new cord ASAP, but if you got what we got with the batteries, don’t waste your time. The battery medic won’t work
The red led flashing quickly tells you the battery has critically low voltage, either pack voltage or one of the cells, and has shutdown. If this happens, don’t keep trying to use the battery until it has been fully charged again.
The battery medic is a diagnostic tool, that’s all, it will not fix batteries but may give some insight as to what is wrong and whether the battery has reached end of life.
In some other robot competitions, teams often only expect at most one season from batteries before they are cycled into less critical application. The constant high current use on a robot puts a strain on the battery, at 4 years old I would consider recycling them.
well we have eight that work great after the diagnostic and found which ones worked so I think we can make it through at least saturday’s comp and even through the rest of the season.