Battery powered raspberry pi

[Joe Johnson]

This is KINDA related so I hope folks will not mind if I ask this here. If people think I am hijacking the thread, say so and I will start a new one.

Sensors on arms, fingers, .... are always a pain the in the eye. I love them but pots seem to always give me fits.

I have an idea for putting incremental encoders on the motors (quad input, 2 pulses per motor rev.). Using these incremental encoders, I can have something like an Arduino keep track of absolute position. But, that means we have to zero the count at some point. Okay fine. We do that in the pits when we are always calm, cool and collected (kidding). But we often have to cycle power on the field. Not only that but we often have to move the arm or finger or whatever while the robot is powered off. There goes the zero point for the CPU that is keeping track of the position.

Yes, we could have a switch on the mechanism that gives a zero point but do you want to do that at the beginning of autonomous? probably not.

So... ...I want to have a laptop or some such that has an integral battery that could stay alive during the power cycles on the robot and could also be a USB host for the Arduino(s) that are counting pulses and also act as a bridge from USB on the Arduino(s) to the some ethernet protocol (UDP I suppose?) to get data to the cRIO.

It seems to me that this would be legal (assuming the 2013 rules apply in 2014).

What does the Chief Delphi community think?

Joe J.