[Thad House]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

FIRST has a battery of capacity X and allows enough motors and such to draw 10X that current.

Having the RoboRIO go brain dead at just under 7V seem to me to be a poor decision. Perhaps there was data that this was not a problem. But I call that data into question.

More to the point, FIRST has 1000s of teams many with no technical mentors to speak of. For a some extra expense it seems to me that that the critical systems (RoboRIO, radio, USB ports, Sensor Voltages, PDP, ...) could stay alive to something ridiculously low making this problem disappear for good.

How low? I would go for 1V (which is possible but could get expensive) but I've heard reasonable folk say 3V or 3.3V would get is 99.9% of the way to where I want to go and is much less technically challenging and also less costly.

Dr. Joe J.

I would even say 5V is reasonable. And easily doable with the current system, because we know it doesn't reboot until about 4.5v. I would still be OK if they system shut of the PWMs at 7v, but left everything else on until 5v. This year wasn't as bad for brownouts because 6 CIM drives were not advantageous, but if next year comes around and 6 CIM drives are king again, teams are going to start learning real quick about that 7v drop out if it stays.