Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankJ
So you build a small battery into a case that holds a raspberry. Make enough to sell to other teams that might want one. create a little LLC to make/sell it. Presto a cots device. Fits the letter & spirit of the rules.
I think the main reason for no batteries in custom circuits is there is just not enough time to adequately inspect them & it greatly simplify the rules in this area.
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That is something worth testing the waters with as well.
The question is what a 'laptop' consists of.
Is a tablet a laptop?
If it is there goes the mouse and keyboard.
Does it really need a display?
I know we removed the display and keyboard from our laptop and it passed inspection.
However both the keyboard and display were present when we bought that netbook.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dtengineering
There is, as far as I can tell, no reason you can't put some significant capacitance across the power input to the Pi, so long as the capacitors are charged by the robot battery. (Dropped to 5V, of course...) The rule doesn't say that you cannot store electrical energy, only that the electrical energy has to come from the battery.
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Well outside of the rules I can think of several reasons to limit the capacitance between the power supply and something like the Raspberry Pi.
The current that a high value capacitor will draw when deeply discharged needs to be limited. If that current is drawn through a 7805 regulator as discussed earlier in the topic it could cause some damage unless there is at least a series resistance between it and the regulator output. If you simply use a resistor like that it will increase the amount of time it will take for the voltage on the capacitor to reach say 5V. If the capacitor is plugged directly into the input of the Raspberry Pi that will create a strange situation where you rely on the reset control circuitry to hold off the chip operation until the input power is at the proper voltage. That could cause some issues.
On the other hand if the power supply from the battery to the capacitor is a switching power supply then you have the problem that happened other years (regarding the radio DC-DC converter) where there is a finite upper limit of capacitor you can place there before it dramatically alters the filter at the final stage of the switching regulator altering the quality of regulation.
So there are a few reasons to properly size the capacitor or use especially high value capacitance in circuits that manage their behaviors. Not to say it can't be done if in fact no one says no to it.