[Al Skierkiewicz]

Hello everyone!
The backup battery was a great addition to the new controller. It does cover up faults that would have been obvious in the past. If your drivetrain was so current hungry in the past, the low voltage dropout would have alerted you to something being wrong. Without that big indicator, many teams now are going into competition with problem drivetrains that have no indication of problems until they break or die from lack of main battery voltage. That makes it really tough on your alliance partners.
The backup battery powering servoes is another problem in that teams with many servoes risk losing the backup without any previous indication. Although everything on the robot is running fine, none of the servoes work. I think it might be an easy thing to add a charge path from the main battery to the backup for charging and powering the servoes. Since the guys at IFI are really smart, I am betting they have already started working on this.