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Unread 05-02-2004, 15:51
Joe Johnson's Avatar Unsung FIRST Hero
Joe Johnson Joe Johnson is offline
Engineer at Medrobotics
AKA: Dr. Joe
FRC #0088 (TJ2)
Team Role: Engineer
 
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Cost perhaps?

I would suppose that they decided to have the servos get power from the 7.2 battery because then they could take a relatively high current 5V regulator off the RC board. It saves IFI money, which in the long run will save FIRST money.

On a side note, this seems to be a case damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The backup battery is more or less a reaction to everyone giving FIRST a lot of grief for "brown outs" causing their robots to malfunction.

Now that FIRST has come up with a solution to keep your controller alive during such brown outs, a bunch of people are giving them grief for requiring a second battery (or for not powering off the main battery until the backup is need, or not trickle charging the backup battery or whatever...)

Bottom line, IFI has done a pretty good job with the controllers over the years. In general, I like what they have done to improve the system over the years. Kudos to IFI.

Joe J.