What's the spirit of R602, and how are teams using it?

Technical Electrical
1

Hey CD,

This preseason we’re doing a deeper dive into our coprocessors and how we manage them. Last year we used 3 OrangePis to do our vision processing. We’re OK powering them from the mains, but R602 seems to provide some provisions around powering them. That said, the rule seems to be directly targeted at utilizing Pis or derivatives that are built around USB power.

  • If you don’t use a device that directly takes 5/12v, then you’ll need to use a buck/boost converted and doesn’t seem to comply.
  • If you’re using a device that doesn’t have a good way to get power from USB (barrel connect for example) then it doesn’t seem to apply.

Full disclosure, we’re evaluating if using a NUC is better than multiple OrangePis. It would be nice to use a USB battery bank to provide power, but since they’re mostly 15-20v it seems out of spec. But I’m curious as to what other teams are using this rule for and what positives and negatives it’s lead to.

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Just to make one note, there’s lots of COTS usb to barrel jack cables. There’s also cables with integrated buck-boost.