R-Net joysticks

[aw186uk]

Hi,

In the Powerchair football club i am involved in we have 2 types of R-Net joystick on the Strike Force chairs and i am wondering if theres any proformance advantages between them.. including battery life.

The older typre use an R-net controller with a basic screen thats got a green back ground..

older type

and the new ones use a R-net controller with a large colour LCD type screen..

newer type

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers

[Burgerman]

Performance wise there is absolutely no difference. As far as the current required to run the coloured joystick pod screen, then there is some small difference. But its in the order of a few mA difference. Not really relevant during a day. So unless you were to leave each one turned on, literally for days, you would never detect a difference without some accurate measuring tools. And even then the system will go to sleep if left turned on. Subject to programming.

The only performance difference will be in the chairs programming settings. And in the actual battery type you use.

And in power modules. There are 4 different ones. The ones you want and probably have are the 120A versions.

[aw186uk]

Cheers.

Yes we have the 120A power modules, we've turned all the standard stuff up ut are now trying to give the player more!

We do have trouble with some chairs running their batteries down a lot quicker then others for some reason... they all run the same MK batteries so it seems a bit odd that some go flat so much quicker.

[woodygb]

Cheers.

Yes we have the 120A power modules, we've turned all the standard stuff up ut are now trying to give the player more!

We do have trouble with some chairs running their batteries down a lot quicker then others for some reason... they all run the same MK batteries so it seems a bit odd that some go flat so much quicker.

Chair configuration differences ( center of gravity balance etc ) ... driver weight , motor type / age , battery age and maintenance will all have an impact on the batteries run time.

[Burgerman]

One problem is thatyou are using MK batteries. The Odyssey battery group 24 doesent exist, but a group 34 does and fits most chairs. Measure first as the top is a little wider. But its HALF the resistance of the MK. It can be charged much faster, and has half the voltage drop under load, and is far better for what you are doing than the MK.

You need a Odyssey PC1500 and charge at anything up to 100A plus at 14.7V CV. You will get far better control, esp halfway through a match. And you can top it right back up to 95% in about 40 mins... Thats because its very low impedance compared to all other batteries.

[ex-Gooserider]

If you look back in the very old threads, there was a lot of discussion about the care and feeding of power soccer chairs.... One of our former members was a coach on the Team USA World Championship team that won the world cup in Paris - his wife was a competitor (unfortunately they have since gotten divorced and he doesn't come around here any more)

It seems to me that a lot of what we talked about here was a major factor in the Team USA win, particularly the battery advice of using Odysseys and doing 'opportunity charging' every time a player came off the court for even a short time... It showed in that the chairs seemed pretty evenly matched at the start of a game, but the opponents got slower and slower in their response times as their batteries started to sag, while the Odyssey powered chairs just kept going full steam ahead...

Soccer is very demanding on a battery due to it's constant high C-rate speed / direction changes, and the low internal resistance of the Odyssey helps cut down on the voltage drop you get when trying to pull high current out of a high internal resistance battery...

(These days I'd be tempted to look at lithium packs, with possibly lead plates in the bottom of the battery boxes to help move the chair COG's lower)

ex-Gooserider