MicroControllers at competitions

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by magnets

Your multimeter (should) have a fuse to protect itself from current, so you should be all set.

What does the current draw tell you? Our team has attended 42 robotics competitions, countless offseason, and have played close to 1000 matches. We have never needed to measure the current draw of a motor at competition, nor have we heard of anybody needing to.

I've used the current monitoring in Jags to diagnose binding in the drivetrain (old robot had picked up some gunk and locked up one side of the drive) as well as to identify that we were initially over geared this year. It's useful data to have for debugging.