Quote:
Originally Posted by bhaidet
I was only wring for a half a summer, but I believe there is a DC->DC step up as part of the standard wiring board. It should be the 2.5"ish square block covered with heatsink fins. I think it pulses the straight battery voltage through an inductor and regulates 24v out. I do not now how much current you could pull from this thing and I do not remember what its actually used for, but you should be able to solder up a step-down circuit to take this 24v to laptop voltage (17-18ish?) in about 10 minutes with an LM317 and outboard pass transistor (maybe the MJ2995 if you want overkill safety without heavily heatsinking).
On the topic of image recognition, is there any pre-existing software (especially Linux software?) to determine the shape of "color" (IR distance) blobs in an image? It seems like if you could see a blob and determine how far away it was on average (and therefore its actual height), you should be able to easily detect other robots/structures on the field.
As to whether having your robot autonomously see other robots/tall game objects will be useful this year... that's still up for grabs until Saturday. 
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-The FRC PD board has regulated 12v and 24v supplies which are guaranteed down to 4.5v, but those are restricted to the cRio and bridge only
-There's also a 5v regulator, I don't think that one has any guarantee on it.
-The heat sink device of which you speak (which happens to weigh a whole 1/4lb, I weighed ours last season) reduced the (regulated) 12v down to 5v for the new radio. Confused yet?
-I would probably just find a single-board computer with either a 12v input or a car power supply, then a boost converter to 12v like the one on the PD board for the radio (guaranteed down to 4.5v or so)
-As for image data, the Kinect returns depth data as an image, so you could effectively process it for blobs like a normal 11-bit greyscale image. OpenCV has commonly been used for image processing, although I honestly haven't used it myself.