Has anyone considered using one of these for your power needs from the robot battery?
http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?rou...product_id=752
(That is the source in China)
http://www.robotshop.com/productinfo...222&lang=en-US
(They carry their products here in the U.S. and Canada)
I have several Chinese manufactured PCB with National Semiconductor regulators and when I have some time (probably in the next week or so) I will power them up and test them at 1A from 7VDC to 15VDC.
I stumbled across that because I bought one of their Relay Shield V1.2 to update my ever growing pile of Arduino swag.