A few days ago Mr. Elias and I were having a chat about powering the NUC. He said that we should start looking at how much usable time we can get out of it while running on battery, so I went to JayCar and got two 2.5mm DC power plugs to connect to our voltage dropper. Our voltage droppers are special in a way because they have two outputs, and both can be 12v or 7.2v

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the servos and the NUC need 12v, we are running it on that. We went for a voltage dropper that has two outputs because we wanted to power both the NUC and the servos off one battery.

 

For this test we are running:

  • The NUC streaming the camera
  • Servos idling

Time without servos running: 1 hour 38 minutes

Jack suggested we should do a test with the servos running. I ran a test with the servos running continuously at 75% speed.

Time with servos running: 1 hour 16 minutes

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2 Responses
    1. Connor Kneebone

      The batteries that were used up to and including Japan were 1300mAh, 25-50C discharge and ran at around 11.1V. This year, we opted for smaller 800mAh 20-30C batteries instead as they still provided enough to keep our robot running for a good 20-30 minutes and were small enough for our redesigned body.

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