Progressing with our controls development we’ve ended up with a “too many batteries” dilemma. I’ve captured our current situation on a diagram below.
As you can see it we currently need our “big fat” 25V battery + couple of 9V batteries to feed Arduino MEGA + its Sensor Shield.
Situation got out of control when we are now adding BeagleBone Blue and GPS shield to the whole scope. Luckily Richard told me about an option to move in a DC to DC converter to reduce number of batteries to the main one (at least for now till we’ll need to have BBB on its separate power rail).
Local Jaycar provided suitable DC to DC Step Down Voltage Converter Module.
.. and I did some testing with it before hooking it up. As you see on the picture below, I am using our power supply to feed in 25V and our multi-tool detects 12V on the output.
It looks pretty nice, doesn’t it?
At the end I hooked it up to BBB and to Aruduino with all servos / ESCs / RC receiver / GPS powered up and it came with drawing roughly 0.36A altogether. That should do!
Finally – it is all mounted in. On a picture below you can see cables connecting our main power bridge (blue and black) going in the DC to DC converter and than from there in the Arduino MEGA.
We did some preliminary testing with Sebi and it might be that that Sensor Shield draws more power than that DC 2 DC can provide, so it is hard to say if this is a final solution. Well, stay tuned and fingers crossed!
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