Hello guys,
I’ve noticed that a lot of issues rises from the USB or Power Adapter not supplying enough juice, and i was wondering why not develop a Solution to counter the issue… a watchdog of some sort that would WARN the user when such situation happens… here is one proposed way… again I’m not hardware wiz but i think it can be done…
I will use a Spider in this example.
Since GHI at least knows and can find out what each module they sell consumes to operate…
we know how much current the spider requires to operate…
Couldn’t these figure get integrated into the firmware… and when those sockets are in use… the firmware can calculate how much the system will draw and compare that to what is being supplied, which can be dome in the DP, and pushed to the spider… i know non of it will be 100% but at least it would give a warning, hardware or software…
the reason why i think it is possible because i see it done in an IPAD for example, where if i accidentally plug my 1.0A IPhone Adapter to the IPAD i get the warning on the screen since the IPAD requires 2.A charger…
Not totally dismissing your idea. But the reason your ipad can tell you is because it actually can measure how the voltage drops when it draws more power than the power supply can, and still tell you because it has a battery to run off. With a Spider, you’re just going to brown out and reset…
The purpose of this is to catch those situations when things appear normal when they are not…
if my board starts reset i know something is wrong with power…or at least i suspect that much.
but more than once when i run into a situation where everything appears working fine and dandy when it actually isn’t due to the lack of power. which is harder to debug than the brown out situation…
the DP USB could take on the roll of measuring the current… and pass that along to the spider when it feels a lack of power.
I’m not saying that’s how it should be done, but what I’m saying is that we have to find a smarter way of dealing with this.
i know we have cleaver people in the forum that would provide better solutions. (I Hope)