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Unread 21-04-2011, 23:44
PSHRobotics PSHRobotics is offline
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FRC #1182
Team Role: Programmer
 
Join Date: Feb 2010
Rookie Year: 2008
Location: Missouri
Posts: 38
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Re: Robot losing and regaining drive power

Oh, I forgot to add the robot works perfectly when driving backwards, it only has trouble going forwards and turning.
We can try to go forward, have it not work and then go back for a second, and it again wont respond when trying to go forward.
The length of the stops were also random, it seemed to range from about 2 seconds to 8 seconds.

Thanks for the quick replies. I was fairly certain it wasn't the battery, I just wanted to provide as much information as possible. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

In terms of code, we took out all loops and waits in teleop before this problem even happened! Those were taken out before the drivers really started to practice. At competition we removed any sensor data (we had the line sensors getting values, and encoders still running in teleop) because another team mentioned that they had a similar problem when they had their sensors (a much larger number than us) running in teleop. At camera code has been removed from teleop because we have no camera's. At the moment, we only have joystick values being fed to a "reverse drive toggle" vi which goes to the motors. Another joystick value going to the motor of an arm. And several buttons: one is used for enabling our compressor (we have an off board compressor but it is required to be run by the program), another is used to deploy pistons. There are also various indicators (for the labview front panel) to get the button and joystick values, but there were even more during practice and there were no problems.

Those reasons along with the fact that we are fine going backwards makes me believe it is not a code issue. And the backwards part makes me think its not a communication problem either.

We use a 2-motor drivetrain. I have been thinking that it may be something with the gearing, but we were running perfectly fine at our school during practice. The carpeting that we had was very similar to the one we used at competition, though the one at competition felt more "padded" or "softer".

Hopefully we can take a look at the breakers and jaguars after we uncrate wednesday. That three second break for the jaguars sounds like it is the closest thing.
If it is the breakers, would that get the robot to stop for 8 seconds?