Ramping Up Voltage

So our team has a standard Andymark DT but we decided to use 3 cim ball shifters this year instead of a toughbox mini. I was told that using 3 cims will draw too much current and brownout the robot, and we need to ramp up the voltage in order for everything ti run smoothly. We’re gonna use 1 Victor SP and 2 SPX on each side. How would we be able to ramp up an SP coz most threads only talk about SPX or Talons.

Aside from the fact that circuitry that ramps up the voltage is illigal in FRC, ramping up the voltage will not let you pull more power from a battery. Increasing voltage means decreasing amperage, meaning you can not draw any more power from the battery

Use 3 mini Cims per side and you should be fine, they are actually much more efficient than their full size counterparts

Unless you are intending to break the rules or this is not for FRC, in which case I reccomend getting a 4s lithium battery

So I am the one who told to OP that voltage ramping is advisable in an FRC discord channel. What I was referring to was voltage ramping in software which is completely legal (AKA not just slamming it with 12V immediately). From everything I have heard, while maybe not strictly necessary, it is highly advisable to mitigate the possibility of brownouts, especially with something like a 6 CIM drive.

I think the OP is just looking for advice on how to do this with SPs through code. Sadly I am not a programmer so I don’t know how to do that but I assure you that using software to do voltage ramping is completely legal.

Yeah i kinda forgot to mention about the software part. But i wanna find if its possible to ramp up SP with only software and how to do it

The Victor SP’s are “dumb” controllers, so they only get commanded a % output over PWM and that’s what they output. They don’t have the fancy features that the SRX or SPX have, like built-in voltage ramping. That being said, you can implement a pseudo-ramp yourself in code pretty simply by taking a rolling average of the last n output values and sending that average as the PWM value.

Instead, consider using the WPILib SlewRateLimiter class.

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