The battery builders club

Thanks, already ordered.

I prefer the unregulated irons with the “BOOST” Button for high temperature soldering.
Used these to solder my battery packs and connectors.
It can heat up a very high mass.

And yeah… 150W for the win

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270W soldering gun and lots of flux.

I did it with an 80W iron and 63/37 rosin core solder…it took FOREVER but I got a nice clean joint

Nkon has big heatshrink

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You don’t need huge wattages you just need an iron with big thermall mass, so looks for something with a big tip

Fuck

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Dang!

I grabbed up 2 cases of those VTC5A.

At $1.35/cell fuck it. They perform a lot like the 30q at high draw anyway when it comes to real world Wh performance

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They’re (VTC5A) sold out too now.
They cancelled my 30q order too

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Anybody use VTC6? I picked some up that were on sale. Have to replace a pack I over discharged. Second one this year :weary::tired_face: pull out those loopkeys damnit!!

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This reminds me of a similar loss- story time, you guys are gonna have to humor me on this semi off-topic tangent

So 8ish years back or so I’m at a robotics conference and we’re demoing this quadrupedal robot I had designed/built out for some corporate benefactor. Shows over, and I made the mistake of letting someone else pack up the robot. I had asked them specifically, if they had pulled out the loop key, and they confirmed they had.

Given that this was a $20,000+ robot, kinda important. This particular robot had pretty long legs and so it had to be folded up like a dead spider to fit into it’s pelican case.

So the person who packed the robot did not in fact remove the loop key. To make matters worse, at some point during it’s journey back home, packed tightly in its foam coffin, the power switch got flipped and the robot turned on.

What’s the first thing it does when it turns on in demo-mode? Tries to stand up.

So now the very expensive, very strong robot is trying to startup, trapped inside the pelican case.

We discovered the robot, very dead, all the foam shredded, and all of the VERY expensive servo motors completely deadlocked from heat death. Very expensive milspec drone-lipos (yeah we used to ship those on air, wooo), also very dead. (very).

Total loss including development/building time was like 30k USD? All because someone forgot to pull a loop key.

This story brought to you by the word: Very.

also weed

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Shit man, I coulda skipped a session with my therapist if I had just heard your story sooner. That’s rough!

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Depending on how you feel about robots with tiny guns, that might have been a happy ending.

(this is on-topic, because batteries?)

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would you say they perform better than 30Q’s in any aspect?

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I’m not sure. They look to hold up against sag a bit better and maintain higher voltage throughout discharge by a margin, but they are still a smaller capacity cell overall. In situations like a 2p/3p they might have some advantage vs sag but its hard to say until I do more hands on testing. I’ve only built out one battery prior using VTC5

30q also just sag like no other cell Ive used, so I’m wanting to try some others for some smaller jump packs.

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What would you recommend as the minimum p-size for a 12S pack to avoid the crazy sag? I was thinking 12s5p of 30q’s, would that still have sag issues? Even with my lipos I sag 5v accelerating on hills

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Check this out.
I needed to clean some used cells I got from @Dog and I found it awkward to hold the dremel and the cell at the same time so I chucked up a small disc sander on the drill press. I set the drill plate at a comfortable height and hold the cell with 2 hands. Total control…
BAM.


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It’s going to depend entirely on the load on the system, ie: how big are your motors/drag/rider weight/current settings.

I found I had to dial my current settings back on the older 12S4P 30q I was rolling around with in my Kaly clone build.

I think once you get up to 5/6p it becomes less of an issue in general- but with that said my original 10S6P 30q pack on my Prototipo/Kaly Gear Drive sagged like no other at 110/70 amps per ESC.

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My 30q from bch shipped and is arriving tomorrow

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