Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

On our Mecanum drive, we loaded the auto-generated mecanum code from LabView to make sure the motors are in the correct place and we've noticed that the robot loses communication with the driver station when it tries to strafe right.
Since it was generated by LabView it couldn't have been a programming issue, and we've rechecked wiring over and over again and nothing looks wrong. I'll update you guys on wiring tomorrow when I can touch the robot.
The voltage drops only slightly by about .3 or so volts and then the robot doesn't communicate any more. The driver station says that the robot is communicating and that there is code loaded, teleop is enabled as well. But any inputs from the joystick are not read until we re-enable teleop. We've tried with two different Logitech Attack 3 joysticks to see if it's an input error and they both do the same thing.
We had this problem last year as well and we've never figured it out.

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

How is you radio wired? Is it connected through from the regulated 12V output on the PDB, then through the 12V-5V converter?
What is the battery voltage reading when this happens?

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

I suspect that your digital sidecar isn't properly powered. It gets some power through the DB-37 cable, but not enough to send a full speed PWM to 4 motors. Assuming that your right motors are inverted in code, a left turn is minimum PWM to all motors and a right turn is full PWM to all motors.

Disconnect the DB-37 cable from the digital sidecar and make sure that all 3 power LEDs are brightly lit.

Have you solved your mechanical problems from your previous thread?

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

Okay, Tuesdays and Thursdays are days left for labor intensive homework so no we have not solved the mechanical issues yet. The mechanical one is harder to fix than the wiring one so we will try the wiring tomorrow after school gets out. Thank you!

As to luckof13, yes the voltage regulator is correct, the voltage drops from ~12.43ish to ~11.5ish then spikes back up to the original voltage.

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

All 3 LEDs are powered on.
I wouldn't say that losing communication is the best way to describe it. It just stops moving. The driver station is all green and the robot is all green. Jaguars are blinking. It doesn't take any inputs after it "dies". We need to disable teleop and then reenable teleop to get it to take inputs. The Dashboard is showing that the joystick is still giving an input after the "death".

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

perhaps your code is crashing ? check netconsole and try to find a minimal test case.

Re: Robot Losing Communication when strafing right
 

I wouldn't know why the code would be crashing? We loaded a WPILib built mecanum program. I'll check later.
Would I need to use a filter capacitor or two to get rid of glitches if that's the case?

Well the problem was that we inverted the motors mechanically and it hurt the robotdrive.
We inverted it in code and it works fine.