Quote:
Originally Posted by onenerdyguy
Ok, so rookie team, with a question: I thought everything had to be powered off the robot battery, so how can we use the Kangaroo with the integrated?
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The rules for COTS devices allow you to put a device with a battery provided as part of the original COTS design on the competition field robots. Nothing indicates that the power for these devices must be controlled by the robot master breaker.
Since none of these devices are allowed to instruct the robot to move directly the risk to leaving it on is somewhat mitigated. A few years ago we put a netbook with an SSD minus the screen and keyboard on the robot and it was often left on then charged in the pits.
Of course if your device does not have a battery and you run an operating system that doesn't like being abruptly shut down, then you need to start a shutdown rapidly before you turn off the robot master breaker. The ODroid XU4 I mentioned above can boot in 20 seconds and shutdown faster than that. It also has a button one can use to start the shutdown without resorting to hooking up a mouse/keyboard/monitor. That button does require some software tweaking to work like that, normally it simply brings up the shutdown screen in Mate.