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Re: [FTC]: Samantha? Like it or hate it?
I just FTA'ed at a small regional and we had two of the problems mentioned here: Signal drops and NXT lock ups.
Excepting the occasional loose wire, the signal drops were caused by low 12v batteries. However, I'm reluctant to blame that on the teams. The FCS uses essentially open circuit voltage to determine the state of charge. That is problematic, as a moderately discharged battery can still show green. Then, as soon as a load is applied, the voltage drops below the Samantha minimum and the module resets. We were fortunate in that our tournament had a 3-hr built in break. During this time, all the teams fully charged their batteries and the problem vanished. Teams that did all their practice and testing using tethering or bluetooth would never see this issue until their tournament. And teams that use many heavily loaded dc motors will be much more vulnerable to dropouts.
An inelegant fix for next season is to run samantha off of an independent battery.
NXT lock ups were the other issue. The only pattern I saw was that some robots never had the problem; the robots that did, however, had it repeatedly (but not consistently).
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