Questions about power control wire and regenerative breaking

Greetings,<BR><BR>I have two quick questions:<BR><BR>1. Does the ground (-) power control wire need to be hooked up to the (-) battery terminal if I am not planning on using the (+) power control wire?<BR><BR>2. Will the regenerative breaking damage the RoboteQ controller if while my robot goes "out of control" for whatever reason (for instance my own programming code), I cut the power using an emergency cutoff switch from the battery to the controller? (I am not using the power control wire to supply power) And if so, since I have read that the battery must be connected, what is the recommended way of cutting power in an emergency situation.<BR><BR>Thank you for an excellent product, perfect for us non-engineer types :).<BR>

1- You should leave the power control wire unconnected. If you connect it to ground, this will turn off the controller. In fact, you should connect this wire to a switch with the other terminal to ground so that you can safely turn on and off the controller.

2- There are really no risks with regen as the controller will automatically detect an overvoltage situation when trying to regen and no battery is present. The manual exagerates the risk in order to keep users from disconnecting the battery during operation. However, it is best to keep the batteries always connected except in the case of an emergency shut down.

Cosma

Thank you, Cosma.

One quick follow up question. From your answer above, I can see that it is generally recommended to always leave the batteries connected to the RoboteQ controller but use the power control wires to turn on and off the unit and I will be adding a switch today for completeness.

I have the battery rechargers on board the robot. When needing to recharge, I USED TO cut the power to the RoboteQ controller using a master battery cutoff switch. However, I think this may be unnecessary...

...so my question is, can I just use my new power control switch to shut off the RoboteQ controller while I recharge the batteries, instead of using the master control switch to disconnect the batteries from the controller? Or would you recommend that I make sure the batteries are indeed not connected to the controller while I recharge them? (two 12V batteries in series, each being recharged by separate Deltran rechargers)

To make it a simple 2 part yes/no question, basically should I make sure batteries are disconnected from controller during recharge or will the power control switch do the job?

Thank you again!

You may connect your charger anytime: Batteries connected or not, controller on or off. Of course, if the controller is on and is running motors, some of the charger's current will flow to the motors. So it is best that you at least have the controller idle when charging, but there again, your charger is the one taking the load. The controller doesn't care.

Cosma

Make sure you read the article on regenerative braking at dev.roboteq.com/dev1/how-to/understanding-regeneration.html