We designed the GreenGiant to only boot when the voltage was good (11v), but not to quit until it gets very low indeed (~9v) at about 95% discharged. This was done so that voltage sag due to large motors wouldn't cause a brownout, but does expect that the battery is well balanced. If the battery has become unbalanced then this can kill the battery. We may have lost a couple of batteries to this in 2022, but the batteries might also have been dying already having not been stored correctly in 2020.
This behavior is all just fine (tm) for regular power cycles, but due to changes in how the robots work, we are no longer seeing these cycles (even when robots arrived in the arena, because the sticks only restart shepherd). In the old world the worst a battey would get is 11v before a round, down to 9v if you pushed it. Now we should expect robots to hit 9v before anyone does anything about the battery.
In this new world we should probably switch to a different blink pattern and refuse to accept start if the battery is less than 10v at R= robot()
We designed the GreenGiant to only boot when the voltage was good (11v), but not to quit until it gets very low indeed (~9v) at about 95% discharged. This was done so that voltage sag due to large motors wouldn't cause a brownout, but does expect that the battery is well balanced. If the battery has become unbalanced then this can kill the battery. We may have lost a couple of batteries to this in 2022, but the batteries might also have been dying already having not been stored correctly in 2020.
This behavior is all just fine (tm) for regular power cycles, but due to changes in how the robots work, we are no longer seeing these cycles (even when robots arrived in the arena, because the sticks only restart shepherd). In the old world the worst a battey would get is 11v before a round, down to 9v if you pushed it. Now we should expect robots to hit 9v before anyone does anything about the battery.
In this new world we should probably switch to a different blink pattern and refuse to accept start if the battery is less than 10v at R= robot()