Brownout behavior - alternative design goals

[MrRoboSteve]

In another thread:

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

*don't get me started about FIRST's decision to allow the NI folks to allow the RoboRIO loose its mind at just under 7V -- this is something close to criminal. Really... this was a really dumb design direction given the customer base and the intended use of the RoboRIO.

FWIW, this year I occasionally saw* robots with low battery enter brownout. These were always teams with bad/poorly charged batteries. For robots that rebooted, I think all of them had a wiring related root cause. Not to say that it didn't happen, but I don't think I ever saw it.

The purpose of this thread is to try to reverse engineer the requirements around the brownout feature, and discuss alternative requirements that might lead to a different outcome.

Here's what I think the requirements were for the current feature:

1. Provide as much telemetry from the robot as possible during low voltage states.
2. Avoid roboRIO reboots during matches.
   
3. Telemetry should show when bad robot behavior is caused by low voltage.

There are two sources of information on the brownout feature that have conflicting information.

http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...anual-id=24166

Page 7 of http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/374474a.pdf

* as FTAA at events with a total of 120 robots (4% sample with some overlap)