[Kevin Sevcik]

That sounds like a much more realistic reading. Hopefully dyanoshak is still keeping up with this thread, as an order of magnitude difference might be a bit important to his plans. Kind of the difference between getting 3 hours of run time out of a dinky 9.6V 200 mAh NiMH vs. less than 20 minutes.

Given your readings, I'd probably budget for the OI drawing 1A if I had the space and weight in my project to be that conservative. Otherwise, I'd budget for 500mA just to give myself a little wiggle room in case you're still a bit off.