Adapt a NXT battery to the Lego Mindstorms EV3

[pasquentmax]

Hello everyone,

I have a little tutorial that I did to adapt a Lego Mindstorms NXT rechargeable battery to the Lego Mindstorms EV3. At €100 the price of this battery is really worth it!

 

 

Edited December 19, 2018 by pasquentmax

[Jim]

Not for the purists, but a good solution to save some money. They sure are expensive.

[pasquentmax]

Do you mean I am a lego heretic ?

[Jim]

7 hours ago, pasquentmax said:

Do you mean I am a lego heretic ?

I’m saying you are practical  

[oracid]

8 hours ago, pasquentmax said:

Do you mean I am a lego heretic ?

[Jim]

When it comes to Robotics, you do whatever you have to do 

Yesterday, I replaced LEGO axles with metal axles. Means to an end.

[MAB]

I've never used one, is there some non-standard connector on it? Can you not just use a LIPO or similar rather than damaging / gluing an existing part (which also has some value)? Normally on things like this, if you can get to the contacts where the battery connects you can use a third party solution if the right voltage.

[oracid]

26 minutes ago, MAB said:

I've never used one, is there some non-standard connector on it? Can you not just use a LIPO or similar rather than damaging / gluing an existing part (which also has some value)? Normally on things like this, if you can get to the contacts where the battery connects you can use a third party solution if the right voltage.

I guess this is possible with a LiPo 2S batterie, but in this case @pasquentmax had an old useless NXT battery. 

[pasquentmax]

46 minutes ago, MAB said:

I've never used one, is there some non-standard connector on it? Can you not just use a LIPO or similar rather than damaging / gluing an existing part (which also has some value)? Normally on things like this, if you can get to the contacts where the battery connects you can use a third party solution if the right voltage.

The two rechargeable batteries have the same connectors but the shape is different, especially the fastening tabs. As you can see on the video, you have to cut a tongue and a detromper. Then you have to put Lego parts in to maintain the battery.Yes, both batteries cost the same price, but when you have NXT batteries that are no longer used, it’s interesting to use them with EV3. It’s just a Lego scheme to force you to buy a battery for 100 euros!

Edited December 20, 2018 by pasquentmax

[MAB]

Thanks for the answers. I agree about it being a bit of a con when they use essentially the same thing but make it incompatible just to make old ones unusable - if there is no functional change they should try to keep things as similar as possible. I'm always hacking things so I've never bought into mindstorms (it costs too much to break it!), preferring arduino or raspberry pi, where of course the electronics and connections are much more open source.

[dr_spock]

Ouch.  Snippers.  It's good to reuse the battery instead of tossing it out and to save some $$$. 

Is there any advantage to the double clips design on the EV3 compared to the single clip on the NXT?  I find it harder to open the EV3 battery cover with just one hand.

 

[pasquentmax]

No, I don’t see any advantage. Indeed, the opening of the EV3 is not obvious.

[Salvo]

On 12/20/2018 at 12:45 PM, Jim said:

Yesterday, I replaced LEGO axles with metal axles. Means to an end.

That's interesting! What kind of metal axles did you use, for what project?

 

[Jim]

12 minutes ago, Salvo said:

That's interesting! What kind of metal axles did you use, for what project?

Check out my robot project.

[Salvo]

Just now, Jim said:

Check out my robot project.

cool thanks!

 

[pasquentmax]

2 minutes ago, Jim said:

Découvrez mon projet de robot .

Fantastic !

Where do you buy your steel axis ?

[XGBC]

sadly lego has always been charging rediculous amounts of money for rechargable batteries

they want to make the most amount of profits with their products and the one thing that is anoying me the most is that you need to pay for a charger aswell.