Battery Holder V2
enothecool
Entry ID #: 9264
Created: Thu, Dec 10, 2020 10:24 AM
Introduction Many people have complaints about the Vex battery clips. They make it a pain to remove batteries, they break easily, or maybe you just want to use one hand for the battery. This new holder seeks to remedy all of those issues. The new holder features 2 parts: a clip, and a holder. The battery slides into the holder and you clamp it in place with the clip’s latch. The part could be added to any robot without much trouble, although it is ideally placed vertically. Process To create this I used Fusion 360 version 2.0.9439. I created 2 versions of this design. The first design worked well, but it did not hold up to the standard of the Vex battery clip, so I created a second version. The second version saw several improvements of the first. The first one was based off the Vex battery clip. I extended the towers on the Vex clip and added extra support to them. I then created cutouts in the towers to allow a latch to slide through; it had a screw holding it on one side and a clip on the other to remove the battery. This design worked well, but the battery did not fit very well and it put lots of stress on the clip. At first I made a box for the holder on the other end, but it was unnecessarily large and never made it to the printer. The final holder was made to be simple and easy to 3d print. All it does is curve around the end of the battery to hold it in place with friction. Although the clip never broke, the design was definitely not superior to the Vex clip. Improvements needed to be made. The second version was created to fit the shape of the battery without any of the complexities that made the first harder to print. I did away with all that and made it out of rectangles and triangles. This made it easier/simpler to print because it did away with all the necessary support that made it more difficult to print. I removed the clip for the latch and replaced it with holes to add a screw. The hole for the screw is tall to allow adjustment if. A pin could also be added painlessly to make the removal process easier. The latch was widened and I added holes to it in order to allow the addition of anti-slip mat if needed. The holder on the other end was widened to ensure it never broke. The design worked very well, and it could challenge the Vex battery clips. The prints I made were never better than the Vex clips, but with a better quality print, or injection molding could make these viable. Conclusion I learned a lot from this project. I’d never designed a custom part for anything in fusion, and it was nice to see it all come together. I gained experience making latches and designing parts from scratch. I also got more experience with designing 3d printed parts. I definitely will (and already have) use Fusion 360 to create more parts for a wide array of projects. Fusion 360 has already helped our team a tremendous amount by allowing us to plan out our robot in advance, making it much faster and easier to build our robot with our limited meets. Learning to CAD definitely helped me become a better engineer and expanded my capabilities to design.
