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I am trying to determine the battery I would need to power the following:

  1. Jetson TX1 board whose website says that its power rating is 6.5-15W, 5.5-19.6V
  2. The board powers a ZED camera with 5V/380mA rating
  3. VLP-16 lidar with 8W typical and 9-18V operating voltage
  4. Multisense camera 7W nominal power, 24-48V nominal voltage
  5. 8 port gigabit ethernet switch that is USB powered.

Considering that I need at least a voltage of 24V to power the multisense camera, I chose this battery 24V, 10Ah, 240Wh rating. Please let me know if this would work and other things I have to consider while choosing a battery that needs to last at least 3 hours. I require something very lightweight and compact that I can mount onto a mobile robot. I also require one battery to provide me with different voltage and current levels for the above devices, so what kind of a converter should I be looking for?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The power consumption of most of the components depends heavily on the activity level of the application (number of frames per second for the cameras, number of active ports on the Ethernet switch, CPU utilization, GPU utilization, IPU utilization, etc). Most of this is determined by the software you are building/using, so basically you may be able to get a rough order of magnitude estimate on power consumption but you are going to have to build a prototype and test it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Dean Franks
    Nov 3, 2017 at 21:18

1 Answer 1

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Simplify your design to the minimum number of supplies that will power all your devices. e.g.,

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Figure 1. PSU schematic.

  • 5 V for the USB power and the ZED camera.
  • 12 V is a popular standard voltage and will do for the LIDAR and TX1 board.
  • 24 V direct will power the multisense camera.

Then,

  1. Work out the current required for the 5 V and 12 V lines. Purchase a suitable 24 V input power switched-mode power-supply (SMPS) for each.
  2. Work out the total power (W) for each line. Assume 80% efficiency for each SMPS.
  3. Total the power (W).
  4. Multiply by the run time in hours to calculate the total energy required (Wh).

Useful formulas:

  • Power, \$ P = VI \$.
  • Voltage transformation by SMPS: \$ V_{OUT}I_{OUT} = V_{IN}I_{IN} \cdot Eff \$.
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  • \$\begingroup\$ The Jetson TX1 board comes with an adapter of 19V, so will a 12V supply decrease its performance in some way? \$\endgroup\$
    – Rajashree Ravi
    Nov 10, 2017 at 19:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ Also a SMPS would increase the overall weight of the system, is there any other way like a DC/DC converter or something else that I can use to make my system as light as possible? \$\endgroup\$
    – Rajashree Ravi
    Nov 10, 2017 at 19:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ Yes, a DC/DC converter is what you want. I don't understand your first comment. \$\endgroup\$
    – Transistor
    Nov 10, 2017 at 20:43

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