AA and relay question
plau45
Posts: 109
in Propeller 1
Ok hello. So I am needing a good power supply for an rc car. I don't care about weight and I want to use AA 1500mah 1.5 boots with 4 separate 4 battery containers run through relay switches to power a propeller activity board. Now the output for a single container would be 6v but all 4 together would be 24 v and that would ruin the board I think. I want to know if using a 4 channel relay switch and only running a single container of batteries until it reaches 15% of power left and then it switches Another container on and the depleted one off and continue to do this until they are all dead would work? I don't want the ab to temporarily loose power eigther or get ruined. I didn't know if I could run a setup like this or not. The relays would also be activated and deactivated by the board itself and if I can do this it should almost quadrupole the battery life I think. Sorry for the mass and run on sentences I'm on my phone and can't structure it very well. Also keep in mind I'm still in concept with this and am open to suggestions of cheap reliable sources of energy and the power doesn't just need to be AA batteries. Thanks.
Comments
When you speak of "ab" do you mean Activity Board or another Parallax product?
https://www.parallax.com/product/752-00010
Can you draw out exactly what you want to do? You will get better answers.
It's not surprising you're having trouble powering a 30A ESC with 0.45A of current if that's what you meant.
What kind of 9V battery are you using? If it's the kind made for smoke detectors it is way underpowered.
How are you controlling the ESC? I think the ESC needs to be sent a low throttle pulse when it's first turned on.
You cannot power that esc and motor from one of the low current 9VDC wall warts. You need a battery pack like you described in your first post. You may also want to provide a separate battery pack for the activity board to avoid problems caused by noise and voltage sags when the motor draws high currents.
I can post a block diagram tomorrow.
The diodes could be replaced with relays or transistors but you would need control signals for them. The battery packs could also be wired in parallel directly, but that may result in self discharging. The diode between the batteries and the AB needs to be there to prevent resetting it when the motors are drawing heavy current surges. A large capacitor to supply current during the voltage dips is also needed. It may be better to have a separate battery pack for the AB.