Quote:
Originally Posted by asid61
What would you define as a dedicated USB power source? The powerbanks for phones are one example, but those have a non-negligible power storage compared to the robot battery itself. One can simply use a larger DC-DC regulator to get bigger 5v power.
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What I have in mind is the powerbanks for phones. The exact wording is something I would leave for the rule makers.
Sure. You could use a DC-DC regulator. It's not that hard, but it requires either a student or mentor who understands the requirements, and a little bit or rewiring and cable cutting to hook the output of that to whatever the coprocessor board requires.
It just means that a programmer who wants to do some cool programming has to team up with someone who understands how to get an adequate amount of 5 volt current out of the available power sources. A student whose focus is programming, and who knows nothing about electricity and power supplies now depends on having someone else on his team that can take him past the "easy" step of finding the appropriate regulator.
Not that that's a huge deal, but on smaller teams that might be the thing that prevents the budding programmer from making it happen during competition season.
One thing that I have seen, both in my professional career and in FIRST robotics is programs stalled because the person assigned to the task knew how to do the "hard part", but not the "easy part". Just last week at the office, I had to coach an expert Java programmer through the arduous task of reading a voltage from a device. We have been working on automotive diagnostics via Canbus. She knew everything possible about networks, communications protocols, and data structures, but we had a new task to mix in voltage data read from a data acquisition device. She knew everything about how to write the program, but she was utterly perplexed about where to connect the wires, or even what to connect them to.
I've seen it happen in FIRST as well. The electrical people can't do anything because they can't write a two line program. The software people can't do anything because they can read the sensor, but they can't connect it to a power supply. This proposal just makes it easy to get over that hurdle.
Whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of opinion.