Fix it in Software

Published on 2020-07-13 in Kubik M0.

I’ve been struggling a little bit more with the safe mode problems. Even with the capacitors, the battery simply can’t give enough current at startup to handle at the same time the servos twitching, the capacitors charging and the microcontroller requiring that minimum 2.7V. The previous robots worked, because I just happened to use better quality servos that twitched less at startup, but I want this design to work with the crappiest and cheapest servos you can find.

Turns out there have been similar problems with CircuitPython on the SAMD51, and now the bootloader for SAMD51 has a loop that pauses execution until the voltage stabilizes over the required threshold. I could port that to SAMD21 as well, but I found an easier solution, and one that will also improve the life of robot on a single battery — simply lower that threshold. SAMD21 can work with voltage as low as 1.6V. CircuitPython defaults to 2.7V because the boards that use an external flash chip require that voltage for the flash to work properly — but I don’t have external flash chip on my robots! So  I submitted a pull request that allows to change this threshold in the board definition , and I also lowered it for the PewPew Standalone and PewPew M4 boards — they will live longer on battery now!

Testing shows that this solves the problem, so now I have to find another excuse to keep avoiding programming those robots.