Powering myRIO with battery

[rw378]

What are the power requirements to run the myRIO with batteries? I'm not very keen with electical specs/requirements. The only info I can find is the power requirement from the manual (6-16V; 14W max consumption; 2.6W idle consumption), and this little tidbit from the NI mRIO General Questions thread:

How long can the NI myRIO be powered by a battery pack? 
We only did a rough estimate based on the mA/h of typical batteries.  If you have 8AA batteries at 1.25V each you would be able to power a 14W myRIO system for 1.4 hours. 
Assumptions made in the calculation:
2000mA is common for AA battery ( you would need the datasheet to be exact)
We assumed worst case power consumption for myRIO at 14 Watts (worst case components, temperature, fully excercising all user I/O at max rates/loads).

More to the point: what would be a proper/sufficient alkaline battery configuration to use? The myRIO is only powering small senors like an IMU. I've tried a 9V with a barrel plug connector. It seemed to work fine at first, but the myRIO suddenly started to rapidly turn on and off. I haven't tried the 8 AA suggestion mentioned above yet, but I'm trying to keep weight to a minimum (hence the 9V).

Any advice is much appeciated.

[Kristoff2]

Hey rw378,

As you mentioned the spec sheet here lists the following:

Power supply voltage range..............................6-16 VDC
Maximum power consumption .........................14 W
Typical idle power consumption.......................2.6 W

It's really hard to say you'll get X minutes when using battery configuration Z because there are many factors that affect battery life.  Things like is the wifi radio on, are you powering devices from the myRIO +3v and +5v lines, are you using a lot of myRIO I/O, etc.

The best thing you can do is try various configurations with your actually system and benchmark the results.  You could setup a battery monitor that measures the analog voltage across the battery and use that to characterize the voltage drop as the battery drains.  You could even do this using the myRIO AI and put the myRIO into a safe state if you think the battery is getting too low.

If you decide to do some benchmarks I think we'd all be interested to see what you come up with.  The more examples we have to compare the easier it will be to get an idea of how various systems will work with various batteries.

Thanks!

-Sam K

LabVIEW Hacker

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[CarlosOtiniano]

Is very true, according to the amount of load to be connected to the device can be estimated autonomy of our application, but according to its nominal features you can think of the use of lithium cells - LIPO and LIFE and second these are must think of a suitable charger for these cells

[SeanJ]

Does anyone know if the battery life can be extended by setting the device to sleep and waking it every minute or so?

[TEVANC]

Flash forward 7 years!

We used some MyRIOs in a prototype design for a tester last year and had a mini UPS on the whole test rig. Now I have a 1/4 kWh Li battery pack with integral inverter and 12v outputs on a MyRIO. When power was interrupted, the pack ran the MyRIO overnight and still had 2 of 5 bars on state of charge indicator only running the MyRIO.

The whole design is moving to a Pi4 board based system, but the MyRIO and MySTEM proto board with MyGLCD display is better quality than what we are able to get for Pi boards. These are low budget R&D projects so no way to slot in CompactRIO gear or equivalent.

[Bob_Schor]

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@TEVANC wrote:

Flash forward 7 years!

We used some MyRIOs in a prototype design for a tester last year and had a mini UPS on the whole test rig. Now I have a 1/4 kWh Li battery pack with integral inverter and 12v outputs on a MyRIO. When power was interrupted, the pack ran the MyRIO overnight and still had 2 of 5 bars on state of charge indicator only running the MyRIO.

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When I first got a myRIO, I was disappointed that it only worked if "plugged in".  I wondered if the same kind of battery that recharges your Phone would work for the myRIO, but there was a difference in Voltage.  A colleague suggested that I get an inverter, which I put inside a little box, cut up a USB cable and a cable from an old "power Brick", a little Velcro to attach the Battery to the myRIO, and (as they say) "Bob's your Uncle".  Great for quick teaching demos, haven't used it in "production" situations ...

Bob Schor