Hi everyone! We’re probably going to use a raspberry pi with the official FRC image on it to stream our usb cameras. We were wondering if it would be legal to power the pi with an external power supply like a rechargable battery to avoid reboot times or would this be illegal?
For future reference I was able to find this in about a minute by opening the robot rules section of the manual and searching for the term “battery”
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Thank you for the information and the suggestion
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It should be noted that I’ve had pretty terrible luck powering a Pi with a 20000mAh (https://www.amazon.ca/AUKEY-20000mAh-Portable-External-Technology/dp/B00R97DNHE) … During boot, the Pi browns out and of course, Pi’s don’t like low-voltage situations. Aukey technical support was none too helpful given that I wasn’t using it to charge a phone which is the only use they support.
I’ll do some testing with a 15,000 mAh battery and see if that runs it efficiently at 5volts 2 amps. We’re considering this: ToHLo 20000mAh Power Bank External Portable Charger Battery Packs Dual Output (Black) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HNFKMV1/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Z2NoCb6N524GW
I noticed the one you used outputs at 3.4 amps which is way more than the pi needs, so perhaps that contributed to you brownout issue
It browned out because the voltage dipped down to 4.2V during boot. 3.4A is plenty for a pi. The factory supplies are only 2.5A.
If you are using the FRC Pi Image, why are you concerned about it rebooting. The image is r/o and is designed for power cycles. It also boots faster then the RoboRIO. Have you found this to be an issue? We plan on using this cable to power our Pi.
We’re just concerned with drawing too much power because we’ve had issues like that with previous robots. I haven’t done enough testing to see how fast the pi boots with this image, but our team isn’t particularly good at getting on the field swiftly, so if it takes more than 20 seconds, we might need to go with the battery pack. If I find it boots fast enough, I’ll definitely give that power convertor a look. Thanks for the recommendation