I think you have a power issue. How many amps is your PSU and how much do the servos consume?

Yeah - I agree with power. A brownout is a disconnect. If it was a blackout, it would stop entirely, or reboot.

a brownout is when one or all of the chips restarts or a peripheral on a chip restarts or a timer restarts. Usually it’s peripherals like timers or dma buffers etc.

Thanks guys. Makes since. Everything was going on the robot when it happened. I may have to increase the available amp capacity somehow. Probably need to add another Power Supply and split the load.

Good idea. Brown outs are difficult to identify sometimes. Because the entire micro doesn’t shut down, only parts of it. Sometimes the servos will stop responding and the rest seems to work. Or something will reset. This is because the micro is actually a bunch of little chips doing different things. Some of the things require more amperage than others. Or, they shut down or reset because the chip design can’t provide enough current to one peripheral. So each micro and it’s program configuration will have different behaviors of a brownout.

What I would recommend in a production robot is two batteries. One for the motors and one only for the micro. A common ground would ensure they’re on the same foundation for measuring current. But the positive side of the power would be connected separately to the peripherals (servos motors etc)

Oh btw, for one of my daily driver robots, I use two batteries. One runs the servos and such and another smaller 7.4 lipo runs the ezb and arduino.

Outstanding DJ! That was just what I wanted to know. I had no idea just parts of the micro could brown out.

Thanks also for the placement of the second PS. I was wondering if just a small PS feeding the EZB would do the trick.

A while ago there were several discussions and solutions concerning adding super capacitors to the EZB to help with power brown outs. Jeremie had some very good posts on how to add them and what to use. I can't seem to find any of these posts. Does someone have a link or two to these?

I'm not drawing any power for any servos, motors or lights through the EZB. All of these are fed directly from the power source through separate fused circuits.

As mentioned above I'm having an occasional issue with my EZB v4 browning out and disconnecting from WIFI when I have many servos and motors running at one time. I was going to place a dedicated power supply feeding only the EZB as DJ mentioned. Then I remembered this super Cap fix of @Jeremie . If my thinking is correct I thought it would be more elegant to simply place a cap on the power input of the EZB.

A second PS feeding just the EZB would be difficult to implement in my case. My robot has dual power types depending on how I set relays. One way is 12vdc battery power directly from two 35ah deep cell batteries wired in parallel for better amperage. The other way is from a power supply that converts 120vac to 12vdc. It's a 20 amp converter, When using the AC to DC converter is when I seem to get the brownouts. The batteries, power supply and relays are deep within the robots legs and I only have 12vdc running up into the robot body.

I wonder if a simple DC to DC converter placed just before the EZB would help smooth out the voltage? Any thoughts are welcome.

Hi Dave,  I always prefer to use battery power instead of a transformer. The voltage from a battery is pure and has no noise. Cable length is also a problem, besides the voltage drop it is also catches any noise nearby. Proximity to the transformer is also bad for digital applications. You could use a good quality DC converter.