Sunday, June 19, 2011

Mobile car chair

First, a little bit of backstory

From before I started going to miters earlier this year, there's been a car chair mounted on an old electric wheelchair base. Unfortunately it didn't work and didn't have a battery pack so it was hard to test. Earlier today I decided to see if I could fix it. Fortunately Shane tipped me off that electric wheelchairs often run at around 24v. I hooked it up to a DC power supply and it turned out it worked when everything is plugged in (with the power supply in place of the battery). In other words, all it needed was a battery.

Soldering the cells:

Heat shrunk & insulated the contacts

Charging the batteries:

Chair base sans-batteries

I forgot to take any pictures of it with the batteries inside and I didn't get any good pictures of it driving around (my phone crashes when I try to put it in video mode). Someone else took some video, hopefully I'll get that soon so I can post it. The chair now drives around very smoothly and has space for at least 4x the batteries I put in it for increased range. It still needs a good mount for the controls and possibly a better interface. Odds are it'll make an appearance next time miters has a booth for something.


2 comments:

  1. woo this thing actually works now! can it steer?

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  2. Yep, and the chair's functions (reclining & stuff) work now. Also, it's plug and play (can plug into any outlet with a normal computer power cable). Haven't gotten around to posting that yet

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