Robotics & Engineering - Week of 10/06/25
The Golf Cart battery system is finally done! Well, almost. We had the whole thing ready to go, and then we realized something catastrophic, but I’ll get to that a little later.
I started the week off discussing some ideas with Tim on how we could mount the lager orange battery cables to the battery system feasibly, considering that the individual cells don’t have any direct mounting points. We sketched some simple ideas. Ultimately, we landed on a machined part of aluminum that has a groove cut in it to allow a bolt to pass through perpendicular to the groove and rest flush when the part is mounted upside down.
Afterward, I decided to attempt to 3D print some covers for all the terminals on the batteries. For the first few attempts, this went really poorly, however I was able to print some at home which helped out. As good as the Bambu Labs printer may be, it always has a 30 person long queue which I don’t have the patience to wait in.
Once Tim made the part to be attached to the battery terminals, I marked the hole location, drilled the batteries (again) and tapped those holes.
Unfortunately, we over-sized the battery system. It is approximately half of an inch too large to fit into the golf cart’s battery recession tray. We designed it to fit in there, but somehow the dimensions were lost in translation and we will have metal fab cut off half an inch from the middle of the frame, and re-weld it back together.
Although this isn’t the end of the world, it does suck because it means we need to take every battery out, remove the bus bars, BMS, and side panels. After which, we have to haul it up to the metal fab shop and wait for them to work their magic. Once done, we’ll have to carefully re-assemble it, and probably get shocked a few more times in the process (that’s the fun part!)
And as a quick side-project, I made a cut-out of my girlfriend’s full legal name because she asked for a name tag and I thought it would be funny. It is also a comically large name tag. She said she liked it, so it’s a win in my books!
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