[techhelpbb]

Thanks I'll forward the observations to them. Team 11 has communicated that this has played a role in costing them 3 losses (when I last look they've lost 4 times...so it's safe to say they aren't over-estimating the impact of this 'phantom' problem). We've sent out the spare 4 slot cRIO FRC2, they are either close to or will have swapped the DC-DC converter for the D-Link AP. They've swapped the AP. They have reflashed the cRIO. They can swap the cRIO. The logs show communication and an 11-12V battery till the communication simply stops. I know for a fact from many test runs that the robot will remain in communication down to just over 9V on that measurment. They are rebooting the entire robot when they load it onto the field as a standard process (this includes the AP and the cRIO).

I've given them some TCP/IP related suggestions to try and now that you tell me this I'm gonna ask them to dump the registry settings on that laptop to get a comparison with one that works.

I don't believe in 'phantom' problems and while I can't say for certain that the problem isn't in that robot extremely little has changed between the MORT district even we hosted and this event. We are not under funded and a bad battery is extremely unlikely because of it. Therefore there's likely something wrong in wireless and if it's going to cost a place in eliminations at a championship I should think it should be a priority to find out what.

It's quite frustrating that we've had no apparent problems up until this point. That we've done basically nothing to the robot to start the problems. That we're not even using any high-bandwidth applications (no sending video) and here we are with problems. The control system on that robot is basically using PWM and if it's not communicating, to put it bluntly, this means that essentially there is no safe design to escape this mess. It's even more frustrating that I pointed out in these forums before these competitions began that we had problems just once before (with last year's robot) like this at a field at a small off-season event and during that time the process for troubleshooting it was hopelessly ineffective because the tools to do the troubleshooting simply do not exist within the context of the FMS.

Having had access to the tools we were offered to do this troubleshooting this year I can say again that the tools we've been offered are clearly hopelessly ineffective. In each case I've seen at the MORT district event and now here the only resolutions have come from trial and error not quantitative measurement. Trial and error means you get to forfit games to test one thing after another and since this seems to mostly effect the actual playing field and not the practice fields you are forfiting games you and your sponsers paid to play to troubleshoot problems you can't replicate on your own.

I'm not sure what frustrates me more. That we can't teach the students through this adversity more about troubleshooting and that technology or that we don't get to compete in the competition.