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Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)

Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)

Posted Oct 13, 2009 14:00 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753)
In reply to: Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) by ledow
Parent article: Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)

Hmm...

Nova uses a "22.2V, 4450 mAh" battery (100Wh-ish if my calculations are correct) and they get 2-4 hours of battery time. By a guestimate, the board mentioned probably consumes about 35W peak. That's a BIG chunk of their operating times, battery weight, etc. being used to just run the electronics there - no wonder a decent optimised library saves them a lot of power. And it appears to sit idle a lot of the time (or else the sub wouldn't have any power to do anything else!).

I think, therefore that the power consumption was a pretty damn big deal in this case, and there was a good argument for sorting out the processing.


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