Recharger

[guerra]

I just reviewed the recharger designed by Benjamin. I tried to make it smaller because most PCB manufacturers charge based on the area, so the smaller the better. I also had to rotate the connector of the robots by 180 degrees in order to add a hole in the position of each robot. This hole is also present in the controller and is used to match with a high screw in the robot, used to avoid connecting the board in the inverted direction.

I also included a newer BOM with parts and links from DigiKey and I generated the Gerber CAM files for ordering at BatchPCB.

See the files in the attachment.

EDIT: I updated the files because the guiding holes were in the wrong side.

[guerra]

I posted the reviewed programmer here.

The infrared transmitter is here.

[guerra]

In the past we had some serious trouble trying to assemble this recharger by hand.

For those starting now, you might consider acquiring this recharger. From the specifications I suppose it should work just fine with the batteries inside our robots. You can still use our original board design, place only the connectors and hook some wires to a bunch of these rechargers. Each robot has two cells inside, so you need at least two of these rechargers for each robot, total of 12 if you want to recharge 6 robots simultaneously.

Please share your experiences here if you did this or if you tried another similar solution.