[sircedric4]

We also had communication problems at the Bayou Regional, with similar symptoms as 364 for our last 2 matches on Friday. We had run all day with no issues, and then all of a sudden we would only work during autonomous modes. We talked to the FTA guy and they told us we had lags greater than 500ms and we were dropping 5000 packets during our matches throughout the day. I believe the average for other teams was less than 20 msec lag and less than 50 dropped packets per match.

We were frustrated that our issues just happened out of nowhere after having an undefeated day. It was at this time that we actually started to hear of 364's similar issues. They seemed to have similar symptoms, and we were one of the teams after the day Friday connecting to the FMS to test our system. Everything worked wireless before we bagged and everything worked tethered. It was only at the regional that we had issues. Overnight I was watching this thread and we did some of the recommendations on here. We got back to working Saturday, but we are not exactly sure which of our numerous changes fixed our issue. We didn't have another bridge or cRio to try, but here is what we did do:

1) Ground tested our system to make sure no electricity was being shorted to the chassis.
2) During ground test, discovered one of our banebot 775's had case shorted sometime after inspection. We replaced it with a new one. (And for future applications we have pretty much decided to go FP motors over the 775)
3) Moved our router/bridge to another location on the robot away from all electrical components and motors.
4) Discovered we had our classmate wifi turned on and turned it off
5) Instituted a complete shutdown of the Classmate after each match to ensure nothing was being held in memory and that our smartdashboard wasn't memory leaking us into oblivion
6) Reduced the resolution on our camera to the lowest setting and dropped the framerate to 15 per second
7) Went back over our C++ code and stripped it down, put alot of our smart stuff like dashboard updates and system polling into a slow do loop that only happened 5 times a second. We put everything but the basic drive functions into that slow loop.
8) Made sure the router is on bridge position before match starts in case it shook to another position
9) Did a lot of praying overnight

We had talked to 364 and they had already done all this with their system so we weren't feeling good coming into Saturday morning about our chances. We however were lucky in that one of those things or some combination fixed our robot enough to be able to finish playing the regional. Our lag dropped down to a bad but acceptable 80 msec average and our packets dropped to 100 average.

We are sorry that 364 had bad issues and could never get their robot to communicate with the field. Please know that the knowledge we gathered from you did help another local team to give the Texas alliance a good run for their money in the finals. Thanks for your gracious professionalism, and I personally hope that your future FIRST outings are more rewarding experiences.