Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Honestly, the issue can probably be solved fairly easily with a buck/boost converter to the roboRio. A quick search on Amazon showed a handful that should work (Max power consumption of the roboRio is 45W according to NI Specs) and they cost under $30. The RoboRio actually has quite a wide input voltage range but feeding it from VBAT just seems like a bad idea. And I'd bet someone smarter than me with electronics could do it even cheaper than what I can find in 10 minutes on Amazon.
Proposed solutions aside - this was a well documented failure mode* of the RoboRIO and I find it extremely concerning that the neither FTAs nor CSAs at CMP were able to identify the cause.
*I remembered having conversations with Brando about the point this happened and what we'd have to change in how we designed robots well prior to build when spec sheets first started coming out.
|
$30 for a buck/boost regulator? Yeah, they'll put that in when they make the next version out of gold...</aloof> Quite simply, I'm sure they just stuck in an LDO and said "we're done with it". Don't forget that since they have an FPGA on board, they likely need several more voltage regulators. Yet If they decided to put in a decent switcher, it's going to be expensive and require expensive magnetics, which will take up more board space. Not to mention the fact that the packaging is low profile, so they may not even have enough height for a decent inductor. Switchers are going to be noisy (electrically) as well. If they were going to do more regulation, I would rather have it done on the PDP, since it's about half the price of a new RoboRio.