Scioly.org

Commercial batteries are anything sold, um, comercially. In other words, unless you made your lithium polymer battery yourself in your basement, you should probably be set. We used a similar battery at states, and everything went fine.
As far as the sled, it is usually pretty low, and I doubt is anything to worry about.

Trying to look into this a bit over the summer and I was wondering if anyone gets those DVDs SO sells on their site.
If so, have you seen the maglev one/are they usually anything worth buying?

mrsteven wrote:Trying to look into this a bit over the summer and I was wondering if anyone gets those DVDs SO sells on their site.
If so, have you seen the maglev one/are they usually anything worth buying?

I have the maglev dvd and it might be worth buying, but in my opinion, it isn't extremely helpful. It's about 20 min long with footage from the 2010 NY states competition div B and the 2011 national comp. The ny state one shows the cars going down the track and could be potentially helpful if you are just beginning/looking for starting design ideas or just want to see what a maglev and the setup suppose to look like . The national one mainly shows cars not moving .

So it doesn't really give dimensions/masses, times or anything of the technical nature of some of the example ones?

mrsteven wrote:So it doesn't really give dimensions/masses, times or anything of the technical nature of some of the example ones?

it gives the time for the best ny state car along with the mass it pulled, but the camera doesn't directly focus on the car construction and describe it in detail concerning all of the technical stuff.

Well that seems... unhelpful for $16

I don't think that will provide much help for me then... I've seen enough of them perhaps now I'm looking for more of the technical differences between motors and blades combinations

A quick thought before fading into the summer....

When they say 'commercially available' batteries, what does that intend?
Can I buy rechargeable 1.2v cells and wire them in series/parallel at my leisure and shrink wrap them to make a battery pack? They were purchased and I dont see the difference between that and getting a couple-a-AA and throwing those in series and calling that my 9 volts.

If not, if I pay a 'professional' to do the exact same thing and have them slap a company logo on it to dignify it was purchased and professionally made? Thus, commercially available.

I don't want to play the 'lets buy $50 of batteries' game next year for my events. I want to get rechargeable packs at the discharge rate & Mah I want... which you can't find outside of some sketchy websites putting Li batteries in series... thats baadd

I don't know much about this event, but I would imagine that "commercially available" batteries are batteries that you can buy as opposed to batteries that you make on your own. I would think that taking a battery pack out of batteries that you bought would still count as using "commercially available" batteries.

What types of questions has anyone seen asked about Amperes law? Did any test get into the calculus/differential equations?

Schrodingerscat wrote:What types of questions has anyone seen asked about Amperes law? Did any test get into the calculus/differential equations?

I've never seen Ampere's law asked about on a MagLev test in my two years of the event (although it wasn't on the rules until this past year). I was hoping there would be some calculus like it on the National this year, but none.