Battery Drama (Week of 11/3)
- vvaldezmelgar
- Nov 7
- 3 min read
Hello Y'All! This week was a fairly short week due to Monday gym(as always) and the school being used for voting location on Tuesday. The work done was mostly on the on the medical device battery, figuring out a new project, and starting to work on props for Drama Club.
With the quick summary out the way, let's dive in!
Starting off Monday, the new BMSs came in. So after removing the old one, I was able to solder the new one onto the battery. I tested the new BMS but the same thing that was happening to the old one was happening with this one. I even added more solder to see if lack of solder was the issue but it wasn't. It seemed that the battery simply didn't have enough charge. Miles again helped me this week as he showed me how to charge the battery using our power supply boxes after gym. It didn't charge much so I had to wait until Wednesday to finish charging it as the High School was being used for voting due to the elections on Tuesday.
While I was waiting for the battery to finish charging on Wednesday, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do for the next project. I know that I want to do a bit of coding for the project but I have no idea of what to actually do. I'm still unsure as of what to make, I'll likely stick to Housekeeping tasks till an idea strikes me. Anyways, the battery was done charging and I tested it. The BMS was picking up the voltage, which read around 7.0 volts. Problems started to arise when I tested the battery with the medical device. It turned on but after a few seconds, it was dim and the screen would fizzle out. it wouldn't turn on again after that. Just before it turned off, I heard a small click which I'm pretty sure is a bad click. I thought that the battery just wasn't fully charged so I plugged it back in for a few minutes while making sure to keep an eye on it as it could explode if it was charged too much. After double checking that voltage was going through the BMS, I plugged it back into the device and the same thing happened. I checked the BMS after the device turned off and I found that it now reading 0 volts. I'm not sure what happened but I think that something within the device took all the volts while it was starting up. I plan on doing a full double check of the circuitry to see if I can find the issue.
The medical device had hit another snag but the Drama Club came to me with a small request. They want Robotics to make some light-up wands to use during the upcoming play. Me and other shop-mate, Sydney are both in Drama so we decided to work on this. One of the Tech Hands sent us some files that we could use as the base for the wand. Sydney didn't really know how to use the Fusion mesh tab, so I taught her the basics, how to edit meshes, change their size, etc. While she worked on the model, I made a simple led-&-button circuit that we can place into the finished wand. Translating the circuit into Autodesk wasn't hard at all since it uses like 4 components max. I wasn't able to start milling it before the end of the day, but I'll do a quick check-in with Sydney before moving on.
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