In the battery testing lab, the voltage of the battery was measured across multiple runs and across each individual run. We concluded that the power of the battery does go down slightly after each run, but not nearly to the extent that was expected.
The figures above represent a graph of the battery’s voltage versus the distance that the AEV has traveled, measured by the tick marks. The line on this graph is like a step that is going down, kind of resembling a negative slope, which means that during the run, the voltage of the battery was slightly decreasing as the AEV was running.
Takeaways:
One takeaway we had from the battery testing research and design was greatly improving our knowledge about the Arduino coding and how the AEV responds. This is because we were forced to create a code that would simulate how the AEV is supposed to run during the real testing. Another takeaway was that we learned that the battery voltage decreases during and after each run, but not nearly to the extent that we had expected. We expected the battery voltage to drop a decent about after each run, but in reality, the voltage only dropped by one or two hundredths of a voltage.
These takeaways will help us moving forward because we will be more confident when figuring out the perfect code when trying to simulate the AEV situation. We will know how the Arduino codes work and how the AEV responds to them. We will also take into account that the battery voltage is dropping, so we will try to conserve energy when making our AEV and code,but we will also realize that the rate at which the battery voltage drops is very low, so running out of battery power will not be a concern.