AAA Floatie

This month I also decided to make a 'AAA Floatie' like my 'AA Floatie'. Essentiallyl it's a float charger for my rechargable batteries. After making the 'AA Floatie', I realized that instead of using 4 place AA holders, that I needed some individual ones too. It seems like no mater what I do, there is often a battery in a device, while the other 2 or 3 discharge because the 4 place holders won't work unless the circuit is complete with all 4 batteries in place. So by adding the individual holders I can keep each of those extra's charged until I need to swap the used one out.

Plus I made the 'AAA' quite a bit nicer. The 'AAA' battery holders come as a 2 place holder, so that meant I only need to have 1 single place holder for a left over from a set. But that gave me room for 44 batteries, and I don't have that many, which is nice because I like to have room to expand. But I decided to use some terminal blocks to connect the wiring underneath the mounting board, and this trippled the effort. But it's a lot nicer.

I was also pretty surprised to realize that the wall wart that I purchased to charge it (by the way, I can use a cigarete lighter or solar panel or really any 12v charging source to keep them charged), had the polarity opposite what the 'AA' wall wart was. I guess I've never had to consider that before, because I thought there was a standard or something. But sure enough, on the first, the center is Negative and the outside is Positive. And on the second, the center is Positive and the outside is Negative (and yes both are 12vdc output). I guess in my naivety I just presumed it was always the same. Since that discovery I purchased a DC Y-splitter so I can charge them both from the same source, which means I have to decide which charger to use, or maybe buy a different one if their Current output isn't large enough, and rewire one of them to get the polarity the same.