[RyanN]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

I haven't posted to this topic in a bit and yesterday when you posted this I was on my way to FEDEX to deliver a backup shipment of boards to Linuxboy. Sorry I didn't see this sooner by I'm recovering from pnuemonia.

First off, I offered merely a solution to remove power quality issues for the D-Link AP not a guaranteed solution to everything that effects the communications.

Secondly:

Team 11 certainly did have power issues with the radio systems.
Other teams certainly did have power issues with the radio systems.

Telling me there is no power issue with the radio denies Team 11 had a power issue with the radio subsystem and so did others. It denies that I have here a bad DC-DC converter that took 3 matches worth of dysfunction on the field in Philly to find, and others have seen the problem go away when the PDB was replaced.

I'm sure it's a real problem if our team is stuck on the field for 3 matches just like anyone who has problems besides the power quality issues. Just as I am sure it's a real problem if your team is stuck because of a software problem.

The fact is there is obviously more than one thing not quite right with the radios and the systems that power them. That was my entire point. Outright denying a power problem can and sometimes does exist...either because of the parts or because of the wiring refutes the evidence that even those who do so present. It also misdirects the people that do actually have power problems effecting them.

A loose connector on the D-Link is a power quality issue. Why are we intent on saying that doesn't happen when in point of fact even Al notes it often does? Not all power quality issues are about the components sometimes it's just the wiring in the power system.

So far as how I troubleshoot the problem: how would you like me to troubleshoot a problem that per the posts in this topic seems to exist most often only on a competition field...when i don't have a competition field to work with? Even when I worked at spare parts at MAR Mount Olive it's not like I can put things on that competition field that FIRST won't allow.

We do have a field but we certainly don't have the competition field parts.

If the issue was about me distracting this topic I openly offered to take this conversation out of this topic.

I do respect you and the others Don. However, expending so much effort on scapegoating me to cover for a power quality issues that sometimes do exist is not a reasonable thing to do.

If you tell people to troubleshoot for a software issue and they have a power quality issue then like Team 11 they'll spin their wheels rifling through the software looking for what might just be a bad power supply to the D-Link.

Our issue at the Bayou regional was most certainly not a power issue. We ruled that out early enough... why is it that a team goes from one regional and doesn't run a single match without dropping field communication, goes to a different regional, with a different field, different staff, different environment, run perfectly the entire time with no fixes applied. Literally packing up a 'broken' robot (as FTA deemed ours to be at Bayou), and pulling it out at the LSR, having a highly competitive robot that works 'out-of-the-box'.

There's more going on here than just power issue, but that's not saying that everyone that has communication problems isn't due to power related issues. I'll admit that we did have power issues early on at Bayou, or at least it seemed to be, when we smacked the Dlink, the power would be reset. We corrected it by using the OEM power cable and hot gluing the outside of the plug to the radio to avoid it moving during vibration and hits.

Bandwidth is another thing I don't believe in. While we had a couple of advanced teams at Bayou, it was nothing compared to what we saw at the LSR. Only a handful of robots at the Bayou used live streaming video from the robot to the DS, at LSR, I would say that number doubled or tripled.

Interference? Maybe or maybe not. I'm not an expert in radio interference, so I cannot say whether or not that was the issue. I did notice at least half a dozen APs at Bayou and the LSR, so yea... not sure...

Driver station overloading? Yes, it will cause issues if you are having saturating the CPU on the DS or the cRIO, but that wasn't our issue. We tried 3 different driver stations (Classmate, Dell M5040, and 2010 MacBook Pro), all plenty capable of running the DS software. Our cRIO ran at around 65% usage on average, and for a real time system, that's good.

So yea, my point is that no one can say "This is the problem everyone is having." unless NI or FIRST comes out with a statement saying what the issue is. We have an open ticket with FIRST and they will be investigating the logs from Bayou and LSR to determine what was going on, but as I understand it, the logging features of the field software, the driver station software, and the cRIO software is still pretty underdeveloped, so the cause may never be determined.

There are things that we...
should have done,
could have done,
wish we would have done,
etc...

but we didn't.

These issues for us were just coming up on CD from the Florida regional, where the Bayou field was the week earlier. I wish I would have checked for things such as other routers with our ID running in the pits, and I wish Team Fusion would have kept on an engineering approach and changed one thing at a time when we were trying to solve the issues.

The issues with our field connection put all of our volunteering mentors on edge. Emails were shot out to FIRST with infuriation over the handling of our issues at Bayou from our mentors.

I feel that we proved to the FTA that the issue was not us. While the same FTA that kept blaming us for the issues was packing up the practice field, Team Fusion was running on it, wirelessly, using the hardware they provided to us. We ran our robot for a full 20 minutes without a single drop of communication. I talked with the FTA and asked what he thought the issue was since it runs perfectly everywhere but on his field. He was straight up rude (I could call him a different name...) and said that the issue is not the field, but is still with our robot. If he KNOWS that the problem was with our robot, he should have told us what the problem was, because I spent the three days of the regional ruling out everything but their system. But I believe he said that to cover his butt. That's what he's supposed to do, right? We packed the same broken robot up into the bag and brought it to LSR, and experienced no issues whatsoever. How is that an issue with our robot and not the field?

And the extent of our debugging went down to taking everything off our robot. We put back the given arcade drive code to just drive our base, with the default dashboard software on the classmate PC, with no camera feedback, and still couldn't run. CJ, our CTA at the event spent a ton of time in our pit going over things with us, and I believe he came to the same conclusion as us that the issue was not related to us.

I know that some of this is offending to the FTAs from the Bayou, but I have said nothing that was untrue from my point of view. I'm extremely upset with FIRST over this problem, and so are all of the other mentors for Team Fusion. For many of the students on the team, this was their first event to attend. I can tell you that none of them were impressed with what they saw.

-Ryan Nazaretian