Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

I am no expert in this field or anything but one of the first things I would have tried would have been to change the radio. I didn't notice any mention of replacing or re-flashing the radio. We had weird issues at our practice field with the new radio, we had to switch to last years setup for practice. The new radio worked fine for us at competition.

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Ya I forgot to mention that. The radio was changed Saturday with a freshly flashed one. No difference in the lost comm problem.
Pete will chime in here. He knows more than I do but I think we tried EVERYTHING we could think of. I didn't even get to see any of the other pits.
Bruce

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Did you try reimaging the cRIO and the Classmate?

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

The list of things tried / changed was numerous,
-radio was swapped plus bypassed.
-cRio was re-imaged along with a different cRio
-the classmate software was un-installed then re-installed (we did not do a total re-image of the classmate yet)
-all Ethernet cables where replaced
- camera was disconnected both power and Ethernet
- all modules in the cRio were swapped
- a different PD was tried
- a different radio power module was swapped in
- all fuses where removed to all other electronics when the small test program was tried.

you name it we pretty much tried it in the amount of time we had.

As I mentioned when the robot comes back home we will digging in to the root cause of this issue, I feel it has something to do with the TCP/IP packets between the driver station and the cRio.

-pete

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

we had the same problem as your problem 1. we found out that our classmate didnt have the newest update on it, once we updated it, everything worked peachy haha

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

I think we needed to try an exorcism. Seriously.
Grr wish we could have figured it out. I think we had a contending robot with a good mini and better than average deploy. Even beat wildstang to the top of the pole once. Now that's an accomplishment.

I'll be baak.

Bruce

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Before I start, I want to say, "I know your pain". As has been stated already, we learn the most in these situations.

Just a bit of philosophy here: It is not your circumstances that define you, it is how you respond to them.

It feels good to say that, but SUCKS when you are the one hearing it.:o

One more thought on the issues you were having. I didn't notice anywhere that you checked or changed out any motors. By chance, are you running any 775's?

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

You guys still have an eager safety captain who wants to learn more! I was teaching him some stuff so that's one good thing that happened!

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

We had similar "random" unresponsive controls and strange bugs in autonomous which we couldn't explain. Sometimes only one side of the drivetrain would work, or the arm might extend but not lift, the robot might sit still for a random amount of time and then come to life, etc. It turned out to be our arm motor (banebots I think) which had one pole of the motor internally shorted to the motor's case.

It took us 4 or 5 days of hard troubleshooting to find. We tried everything similar to what you describe and more including swapping out the cRio with one from a neighbor school that no longer competes, swapping the power distribution board, rewiring most of the robot, pouring over every line of code many times over, etc.

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Other than CIMS the only motor we used was the FP in the FP gearbox.
Bruce

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Team 930 had similar problems. We had weird errors for that and were not able to drive the robot for half of our matches. One thing that happened was that during one match, the robot (controls) worked completely fine. No software was changed. All we did was bring the robot back to the pit, finish some mechanical details, and sent it out for the next match. During the next match, however, we had watchdog errors and could not drive the robot. We pulled off the controls (crio, radio, and jaguars) before shipping, and will be sure to test all of these to see if they were causing the problems. (one major factor we found was the classmate. Running tethered in the pits, *most of the errors went away after switching to a different laptop)

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

One interesting observation that we made this week on our practice robot is that while attempting to download new code on a tether, we kept getting errors.
We would reboot the CRio and it would seem alright by its LED sequence but we finally noticed that the Ethernet port on the CRio would not light either of its LEDs.
We replaced with a fresh battery and everything was fine.
I only point this out because it seems that in our case, the Ethernet port on the CRio need more voltage or current than the other functions of the CRio.

If this is actually consistently the case, then it is very possible that low voltage can first lead to communication errors without indications of other failures within the motors/contollers/CRio, etc.

Has anyone done any intentional brownout testing to determine the order in which control fails as voltage is slowly lowered?

Combine this with a intermittently shorting motor and you have a difficult quandary to diagnose.

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Did Team 706 use Labview, C++, or Java to control their robot?

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

C++

Re: 706 had the curse of all curses
 

Pete,
This has been bugging me for days. In talking this over with our software team and they are as stumped as I am. I know this doesn't fix the weekend but at this point the only way to attack this is to disable chunks of the code to try and search down where and if it is in the software. Can you try just using a simple program first to make sure. Say just run a compressor routine and see what happens. We changed all the hardware I could think of so that kind of points to code as the fault. I suppose it is possible that you have a freak Crio chassis.
For those watching, (you too Don) this robot would just blink out randomly. Sometimes at 7-10 seconds and sometimes longer and the interruption would last a second or two. Not the normal watchdog issue we see/saw frequently as described earlier. Just seems that everything shuts down. They even tried running the Crio from a bench supply.