Hey all - I’m working on finishing up the overall system and mechanical design. I’ve switched from the concept of using multiple connectors as shown in the posts above to now just using a single 4 pin Cobalt 14 connector for power and communications. These are big enough to handle the current for BlueROV and also the data pins are large enough to be very robust for tons of mating cycles.
To charge it you will just unplug the Cobalt connector and plug in the USB charger cable.
There will be a very small PCB added to the BlueROV electronics enclosure that contains a protocol converter board that converts from communications available in the battery pack to other options such as I2C, UART, CAN, etc. I think the best option for getting the data into the BlueROV will be via SMBus (I2C) which is one of the standard interfaces for smart batteries available in Ardusub. I haven’t done a full vetting of this yet though. If anyone on the Blue Robotics team has advice or would like to partner on this that would be fantastic!
The red rotary switch is a method to force power states on the battery.
Now targeting a price of about $750 for the battery.
Would love to hear feedback and suggestions especially before prototyping to make sure this thing works for as many people as possible.
