Group Documentation: Week 10, group 1 (Tammi, Gillian, Hanna, Sierra S.)

Output Devices

How we determined power consumption of an output device (with a servo motor)

Power equation: P=V*I

To determine the power consumption of our servo motor, we measured the voltage and current while the motor was running and after we manually stopped it (stalled motor). To measure current, we put the multimeter into the circuit. We found that the power consumed by the stalled motor was about 100x greater than the power consumed by the motor running as usual. This is because the measured current was much greater for the stalled motor than for the running motor. Current is represented by I in the P=V*I equation. A stalled motor could evenually result in burning out the microcontroller as the current is much too high for much too long.

	Voltage	Current	Power
Not Stalled	4.926 Volts	0.078 Amps	0.384 Watts
Stalled	4.32 Volts	0.3869 Amps	1.67 Watts

Test Circuit With Motor & Arduino Uno


Measuring Voltage


Measuring Current