Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon_L
If 118's loss of comms was because of the programming loop involving the gyro, I have one question.
Did they experience these issues before Einstein? did they just load new code before Einstein? Or is it a possibility that the issue with the wire crimp just decided to pop up conveniently as all the robots were dropping comms like flies?
I could not find an explanation for this in the report...am I missing something?
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We did not change any code before Einstein. As Greg states, this was likely an issue that was with us all season. While we know the gyro reporting bad data was the start of our error chain, we’re not 100% on why we got that bad data. The way we could replicate this failure post Einstein was by unplugging the gyro (no data = bad data). The report states a faulty crimp is the most likely cause. This may in fact be true, however, it’s a little hard to accept due to seeing the failure so infrequently and having no issues in between. For instance, we saw one of these failures on practice day of Houston. Without touching the robot, we were able to run another practice match immediately after with the exact same robots on the field. This match ran without issues.
After this practice match in Houston, we replaced the cRIO. We didn’t see another occurrence of the problem until the first match on Einstein. Obviously we thought the cRIO fixed the problem and there was no need for further troubleshooting.
Looking back we can only assume that the problem outlined in the report was the cause of the one failure we had practice day in Houston and the two semi-final matches in Connecticut. The second leg of the error chain was part of the code. After Connecticut, our programmers literally spent hours looking for a spin loop without an exit. It simply wasn’t obvious and they didn’t find it.
As Greg alluded to, one big lesson learned for us is how to better perform our full robot checkouts, which we do before and after every match. We did NOT include a run through autonomous mode during these checkouts, which meant we would never have seen this failure. Had we done this, we may have seen the failure more often and been able to better diagnose it.
We learned some valuable lessons from this, and are very thankful to Greg and the FIRST team up in NH for their work with us and all the Einstein teams.
We know how horrible it feels to have our robot not compete due to reasons that ultimately were our fault. We’re sure it must feel much worse to those teams who were brought down through no fault of their own. We can’t begin to express how saddened we are to know that this happened to our fellow competitors.