Holy smokes Batman, it’s time you meet the BattHawk! Here at Muncie’s Robotics, we have manufactured a new design, the BattHawk™. It is a voltmeter that can replace a battery flag, measuring the battery voltage without draining it significantly during competition times. This can help dramatically since the status of all the batteries will be continuously visible. This allows one to monitor the charge of each battery by just looking at it!
Although there are many steps to create the BattHawk, most of which are quite simple and precise, it takes about 5 minutes to complete. The first step is to design the mold. This process took about a year to complete. All of the initial iterations were printed with a 3D printer. Once finalized the design was sent off to a mold maker for the first 2000 housings. And with these, we PhyXTGears team members can make these BattHawks so that other robotic teams like us can use them. The next step is to get the meters and cut, strip and separate the wires. The wires are then soldered to rivets which have been previously milled. The meters are then tested before being inserted into the housing along with the rivets. The rivets are then peened.
After that, the front and back pieces are hot glued together and the unit is compressed until set. Because of the compression, the hot glue leaks out from the edges. A cleanup operation removes the excess glue.
Next, they need to be tested and sorted by tolerance. Approximately, 5% are out of spec or do not work, so they cannot be used. A hole is drilled for a key chain and the rivets are set. Once the key chain is added the units are placed into a green bag with instructions. Once done, they are distributed worldwide by AndyMark, a robotics part distributor.
Our purpose for this design? Our purpose for the BattHawks is to raise money for our team and to also raise money for building our robot once competition season approaches. And as this season is now in session, we are all very excited and looking forward to it!
