Comments by Jan

  • Simple hardware approach to controlling a servo

    Simple hardware approach to controlling a servo

    - 15 October 2013

    Nevio,

    It could be all kinds of things, and I don't think it's worthwhile to troubleshoot here. I think you should go with something like our micro maestro servo controller:

    http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1350

    It will let you do things like make a script that will use two buttons to do the up/down feature you wanted.

    - Jan

  • Simple hardware approach to controlling a servo

    Simple hardware approach to controlling a servo

    - 11 October 2013

    Hi,

    That kind of topic is well outside the scope of my expertise. "Low voltage" to me is usually below 12 V and maybe even below 5 V, and anything above 30V or so is high voltage to me.

    - Jan

  • New products: Optical encoders for micro metal gearmotors

    New products: Optical encoders for micro metal gearmotors

    - 8 October 2013

    Hi, Ted.

    There are two aspects to this: physically getting the encoders in there and doing something with the signals.

    I'll deal with the computational part first since that applies to any platform. At the top end of the performance, the motors and encoders give you about 10,000 counts per second, and with two motors, that's 20 events per millisecond. So, you would likely need something much more powerful than an ATmega328 type of processor to deal with that and still do something interesting, like maybe some trigonometry.

    On the 3pi, the encoders could fit in the original motor postions but they would partially block the expansion port, and getting the motor leads connected to the existing motor connection points would be tricky. You can get around that by going to the extended brackets, which would let the encoders fit without blocking anything but would also make your wheels stick out more.

    The encoders fit in the Zumo chassis, though you will have to figure out how to get the wires from there to your own electronics (our existing Arduino shield does not support the encoders, so it's not a useful starting point even if you had something more powerful than a regular Arduino to plug into it).

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 4 October 2013

    Manuel: Two AA batteries will likely last a lot longer than a button cell battery, which is usually used because of space or weight constraints. So if those are not issues for you, you should be fine.

    Ark A.: yes. You might start by looking at http://learn.adafruit.com/minty-boost .

    M. Milani: no, batteries do not "push" current into your circuit. The higher capacity battery will just deliver the current for a longer time.

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 1 October 2013

    Mark,

    I am happy to hear you figured out your problem. For anyone else reading this, I should point out that the three batteries in series make it a 36 V system, not a 36 watt system (that will depend on the current).

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 23 September 2013

    Hi.

    Just changing the batteries for higher capacity ones shouldn't cause your motor to die. However, there might be other factors like the new batteries being heavier, which could put more strain on your motor and lead to the failure.

    You also wrote "batteries" (plural); if you originally had something like two in parallel and changed it to two in series, you would have gone from 12 V to 24 V, and that could definitely lead to your motor wearing out quickly.

    A final thought I have is that the motor is not necessarily what broke; have you verified that independently? The things like higher load and higher voltage that could damage your motor could also damage the control electronics.

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 16 September 2013

    Matt,

    As long as you are talking about "amps per hour", you do not understand it. "Per" means you are doing division, so something like "watts per hour" is very different from "watt hours", which is watts *times* hours. Units like amps and watts are already rates (coulombs per second and joules per second, respectively).

    As for your main question, I specifically went over it in the post, and you got it right in your follow up post, except for the "per hour" part: a 2Ah, 10C battery can deliver 20 amps.

    - Jan

  • Small things in the pipeline

    Small things in the pipeline

    - 9 September 2013

    Hello.

    We have what should be a final configuration for the corresponding sensor board, so we just have to do initial production and make the product web pages and documentation. We should have that done by the end of the week.

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 15 August 2013

    How well different battery types handle high loads is generally a very relevant consideration, but your ~2 A discharge rate is not that much for these batteries, so the alkalines having 5x the capacity should far outweigh the variations in high-discharge rate characteristics.

    This is not that complicated, and your latest question is whether 26 is bigger than 17. If you gave two more similar numbers, like 17 and 19, you should just try it and time it if it matters much if one does 8 hours and the other does 8.5.

    - Jan

  • Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    Understanding battery capacity: Ah is not A

    - 14 August 2013

    Robert,

    Your question boils down to: do D alkaline cells store more than 3.3 Ah? http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html lists 17 Ah, so if that's correct, it's no contest.

    By the way, your 0.2 Ah/day will use up that 3.3 Ah in about two weeks even without any pumping, so that is not a viable option, anyway.

    - Jan

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