Thread: Powering the cam without a backup battery
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Unread 24-01-2006, 10:10
mogunus mogunus is offline
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AKA: Luciano DiFalcone
FRC #1350 (Rambots)
Team Role: Programmer
  
Join Date: Jan 2006
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: RI
Posts: 19
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Re: Powering the cam without a backup battery
Our team had this issue too. On the normal (not-FIRST) cmucam2 board, there are actually two +5v power inputs, one for the servos and one for the camera board itself. There's also a jumper to set the servos to use external power, ie the second +5v input specifically for servos. I'm fairly sure that the first version of the board also has that jumper, but I can't find the pins to hook the extra +5v for external servo power.

The servos work fine with only 5v in the normal power slot, but a little slower. (Our team connects the camera to digital in/out). I think the trade-off is worth it, though. For no irregular performance and no chance of draining the backup battery, you just take a bit of a hit in servo speed. This afternoon when I get to robotics though, I'm going to be poking around the FIRST cmucam2 to try and find where they moved the external servo power jumpers. If I find them, I'll post here. That'd give us best of both worlds: assured battery life, and max servo speed.
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