The typical use case for my GoPiGo3 robot Dave is:
- Pick Dave up and plop him on my desk
- Select an OS from my “SD Card Book”:
- GoPiGo OS
- PiOS 64-bit Bookworm Desktop
- PiOS 32-bit Bookworm Desktop
- ROS 2 GoPiGo3 Humble Hawksbill / Ubuntu 22.04
- ROSbot Dave Galactic on Ubuntu 20.04 ← This one was Dave’s 1k “Run” around the lake
- Dave PiOS Legacy Buster
- Dave PiOS Bullseye 32-bit with OpenCV from sources and PiCamera2
- Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur
- Insert chosen SD card, return Dave to floor
- Plug charging wire into Dave’s “Power Distribution Cable”
- Turn Battery On, Press the GoPiGo3 “On/Off” button
- Run ssh-keygen -R on Dave’s IPv4 adress
- Login and work on new software
- Unplug/Replug Dave to try/fix the new software
- Git add/commit/push the new software up to GitHub
- Shutdown Dave, unplug
But last night as part of giving Dave a 24/7 life, I decided to recheck the health of the Li-Ion battery after 2+ years:
- Started after a “Running Full Charge” - egpg.volt() reading of 11.8v
- Diode/cable drop was 0.6v when charging and 0.8v when discharging
- Dave configuration has battery supplying power to the GoPiGo3 with RPi4 2GB, and Pololu 2A 5v supply feeding the YD LIDAR (idle, not spinning), running the measurelife.py program at uptime reported load of 0.1
- Software shut down the robot “just before the battery would have jerked the power” - egpg.volt() of 7.6v
- Total test Battery Life was 5 hours 6 minutes to 4 consecutive egpg.volt() readings below 7.6v
********* CARL Basic STATUS *****
2023-10-23 03:06:42 up 9:02, 1 user, load average: 0.16, 0.08, 0.08
Battery volt(): 7.56 get_voltage_battery() 7.56 At The Battery 8.36
get_voltage_5v(): 4.95
Processor Temp: 40.9'C
Clock Frequency: 1.20 GHz
throttled=0x0
WARNING, WARNING, SHUTTING DOWN NOW
BATTERY READING 7.51 volts BATTERY VOLTAGE 8.31 LOW - SHUTTING DOWN NOW