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Greg,
At the moment the PBASIC code running on our robot does not use the current data to limit motor output. We are beginning to experiment with that on our practice robot now. Right now the information is merely presented to the drivers. Unfortunately getting their attention can be difficult during a match, so we are exploring the possibility of having the Palm make alert noises when conditions are bad. We actually are not having any problems tripping breakers at the moment so that hasn't been an issue. However we are working on incorporating a mathematical model of the circuit breakers into the Palm so that we can predict when the breakers are getting close to blowing so we can alert the drivers.
As for the motor sampling, I think my explanation above was slightly off. What we do is sample each motor for approximately 1/8 second as fast as we can (roughly 60kHz). The average of this dataset is then sent to the robot controller, and the microcontroller moves on to the next motor. Each time we output the current motor we are sampling as well as the average current. Even though we have 4 bits for the motor number we only use 3 (8 motors). We left the extra bit for other possibilites such as using the gyro. Our robot only uses a few limit switches so this is how we can get away with sucking up so many of the digital inputs. However, earlier in the season we weren't sure if we could use those digital inputs or not so our custom circuit board is equipped with a DAC so we can output an analog average to the robot controller.
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