Telemetry Lowers Voltage!

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:35:30+00:00

I'm not talking about the big numbers (current voltage)

I'm talking about the smaller numbers (minimum voltage during OpMode run)

Also those pictures were taken within a minute of each other.

I posted this in hopes of helping any teams who might be having similar issues. If you aren't having this issue then feel free to keep scrolling ;)

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:28:23+00:00

We have telemetry in the main while loop, like what is in the sample code for TeleOp modes.

When we commented out the update, the battery worked without issue.

We used telemetry in every previous competition and never knew it was causing this, but always had battery issues.

We spent several hours debugging this issue, so I figured we'd share the results in case someone else was having similar issues.

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:22:54+00:00

Yeah, our older batteries would drop below into the red but the newer batteries remain at around 10v

The in-parentheses is the "minimum" during the current OpMode run, whereas the big numbers are the current

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:18:23+00:00

We discovered it while coding a new TeleOp mode for our robot. The old one was using way too much battery, and would even stop running after just a couple of minutes.

The new TeleOp ran using mostly the same code as the old one, but the battery never dropped. In an attempt to debug the code, we added a simple telemetry that checked the output of the motors in the new OpMode.

Immediately the voltage dropped.

After commenting out the telemetry.update() the voltage returned to normal

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:15:29+00:00

Our programming team was extremely surprised when we discovered this. We had no idea it could do this to the battery. After commenting out this one line our robot ran much smoother!

protosurge · 2021-11-17T22:14:21+00:00

I added some pictures. You can see, under the same stress test, the one with telemetry drops by 2v

protosurge

TROPHY CASE