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Unread 08-08-2013, 11:19
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AKA: Nathan Lerner
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Re: Battery powered raspberry pi

Quote:
Originally Posted by techhelpbb View Post
Up to about 100uF (way less than even one super capacitor) you are not proposing something unusual.

What is required depends on how badly the power from the battery is being hammered. In a well designed fully operational robot the battery might never drop below 7V and 100uF would be just fine. Actually in that case even 10uF is more than enough.

However there is the not so unusual case of a robot with some design issues or damage that draws too much on the battery in random and unpleasant ways.

Then you get into the territory where you want storage of power segregated from the main battery. You can't do that with a small number of typical capacitors. You could store this kind of power in super capacitors. However then the design requirements go up.

With super capacitors it is possible to make a circuit that could have the robot battery pegged at 1V for 15 seconds and still provide power to the computing device like nothing unusual is going on. Why? Perhaps the extra computing device is monitoring that system or taking a hit like that will make that computing device do strange and unpredictable things that could complicate troubleshooting.
True, It would be better to use the super capacitors I guess if the robot's power is really unstable. On the other hand though if the power is truly that unstable, it might be better to concentrate on fixing the power issue before working on a power supply for the raspberry pi.
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