My schools teams have been noticing a decrease in our motor power and battery level I would just like to know do the batteries and or motors have a “end life” so we need to retire it
Well with most rechargeable batteries, if you do not do a power cycle around once a month (totally using up all the battery power and then recharging it up again all the way) the capacity of energy a battery can hold will steadily decrease. You should have done this when you first bought any battery. There are other ways of keeping the energy capacity high (something about freezing batteries or something in some other thread).
I don’t think motors have an end life, although if you continually push them to the max, they probably will break sooner or later or overheat/trigger the breakers faster. Btw, be careful about your wiring, we have pulled the wire out of our motor one too many times.
Read these articles to understand the three different main battery chemistries. (Old VEX batteries are Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd), new VEX batteries are Nickel-Metal-Hydride (NiMH) and the ones in your laptop, cellphone, or iPod are Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) or Lithium-Ion-Polymer)
NiCd: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_nickel_based_batteries
NiMH: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_nickel_metal_hydride
Li-ion: [http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
(Don’t worry, the articles aren’t that long. The comments take up half the page or more.)](http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries)
We have not really had any problems with our batteries. We seem to power cycle them often. Our motors on the other had do start to die out. I tried cleaning them up internally and it does nothing.
What I did was took fire phoenix’s advice and set a generic program for a motor to spin infinitely until the battery was dead red then recharged them see how it works tomorrow
Thanks to everyone to being so supportive:)))))))))))))))))):(???:(???:)!!!