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 To me, being in FIRST is the biggest learning experience anyone can have. I want to give that experience to everyone I can, be it now or thirty years down the line. - BandChick [more] |
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#1
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Scouting Power System
Seeing some of the issues we have had in the past, we are looking into working up a power supply system for our scouting setup this year.
I know a few teams from that thread have worked with UPS's or other things, could you provide details on your power setup? Here are my thoughts for ours so far... Power Draw 1 Linksys Switch 6 IBM Thinkpads 1 Dell Lattitude D600 If my numbers are right, we need ~1100Wh supply to run for 9 hours I would prefer to stick with DC, so DC-DC converters from a Marine Battery or from military BB590 Batteries (Harris has easy access to these). It seems like a lot of teams do DC-AC-DC which is just so terribly inefficent that I don't want to lug around that extra power Anyone do anything like this? Ideas? |
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#2
11-02-2011, 15:52
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Re: Scouting Power System
When we need extra power we just take robot (or car) batteries and attach a power inverter. Yes is is rather inefficient but it is also simple. And you could stretch the power by using power saving settings on the laptop.
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#3
11-02-2011, 16:23
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Re: Scouting Power System
One of the reasons that the DC-AC-DC system is used is that the inverter and the rectifier-power-bricks for the laptops or whatever supply the system with a good level of regulation and signal-grooming. Take that away, and you may just fry a laptop or two. Be warned.
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#4
11-02-2011, 17:13
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Re: Scouting Power System
um... didn't read the part about 7 laptops. So lets see 1100wh/12v= 91ish amp hrs so that's 2 normal car batteries now take into account 80% inverter efficiency 91/.8= 113.5ah now say the laptop power bricks efficiency is around 80% 113.5/.8=142.5ah that means you would probably need 3 fully charged car batteries hooked up in parallel to get the appropriate amount of power which at this point would be 142.5x12=1700wh.
Unless of course you already took this into account in which case you should be fine with 2 car batteries. |
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#5
11-02-2011, 19:15
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Re: Scouting Power System
My freshman year (Lunacy) we tried our UPS with our 7 laptops and a switch. The inverter couldn't handle any more than 3 laptops at a time, and the batteries instantly drained. It did NOT work for us at all. We evolved to essentially creating our own scantron. The best mix between paper and technology.
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