by Humanoido

Switch your Penguin Robot over to Rechargeable Batteries and Enable a Renewable Power Source!

The Penguin is a great robot with many well designed features. But to keep it from gathering dust, you need to feed it a good food diet of fresh batteries. No, not leftovers. No, not those cheap mixes you're thinking of with one new battery and one old battery. You must have fresh, fully optimal, batteries or Penguin will not have enough energy to walk. You see, the servos require a lot of instantaneous power, unlike the mother- board, display, compass, infrared transmitters and receiver, etc. So, unless you want to operate your Penguin without motion, use new batteries.

After a couple hours of use, you'll need a new set of batteries. Of course, this depends on how much motion is programmed. Batteries could last far longer if you're using sound, display, compass or some other features not related to the servos. To help matters along with the servo, please do the upgrade with the electrolytic capacitor on the aux5 port as was previously described. It will help prevent resets and enable the servos to start-up more efficiently.

For tests, I am now using a set of rechargeable batteries. The code name is ICR123A. The batteries with charger were purchased in China at a cost of US$12. Batteries are rated at 3 volts each and take about 2 hours to recharge. The charger has a multicolored LED to indicate charge status. The Lithium Ion battery is a high energy release battery typically used in camera photo flash applications. Some texts say the recharge version has a little less power than the non recharge version but I have not noticed any deviation from perfect performance.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

However, it's a known fact that if you're programming for long periods of time, you may want to build a well regulated battery eliminator. These rechargeable batteries have already had a series of tests with Penguin robot and performance was outstanding.

This set of batteries and charger has enabled a renewable source of power for Penguin.

Battery Data Battery Operating Range

This battery data is found in the comments from the BAT Penguin code downloaded at the following link. It gives a guide for battery operation and what constitutes too low voltage:

http://www.p-robot.com/sources/SuperHero.zip

More info at Parallax Forum