Power for system check

[SciDKelly134]

In the semi-finals at the Shakedown, our robot was acting strange on the field. When we pulled it off between matches to do a systems check, we had that new controller sinking feeling. "How do you power up without an AC adapter?" If there is a way and I missed it in the documentation, please let us know. We are going to check out a power inverter today.

Hopefully our EE's can let us know if it will be safe to use a power inverter for the drivers station or not

[nathanww]

weh have had sucsess in the past with running the IFI OI and radio modem off a battery pack, to build a portable robot controller for a school open house. One could probably do the same thing with the new system, which would be a lot more efficient/less kludgy than using an inverter

[kbaker159]

We wired up a nice long cable that plugs in to a spare port on the robot to power the drivers station. We never had to use it but another team, don't know the number, but the name was Rambotics out of Denver CO, needed to power up theirs and we powered their DS off of our robot.

[Jon Stratis]

Having a battery attached to your OI can be extremely useful. Last year, we had a 12V battery hooked up to a custom circuit board that would power the OI and the USB chicklet (at appropriate voltages) that would last about an hour (to be unplugged from the OI during competition). Unfortunately, at competition we ran into <R106>, which stated that any battery hooked up to the USB Chicklet had to be equivalent to the backup battery and had to swap our battery out.

This year, i don't think we'll run into that same problem. There's <R80> (nothing connected to the power connector during a match) and <R81> (anything connected to the USB or analog/digital IO ports can only be powered from those ports), but neither of them prohibit having a battery there if it's not attached, and this year the battery is only attached to the Driver Station when we need it.