[Ryan Dognaux]

Thanks to Al & the other field management volunteers for talking to our team on Friday & Saturday at the end of the Central Illinois Regional and spending a lot of their time helping us troubleshoot our robot issues. Some of our sporadic performance at CIR was due to what we now think were power issues. We're running a 6 CIM all gear drive through the 3CIM VexPro ball shifters, with an on-board compressor as well that runs for a lot of the match. We switched our jaguar motor controllers to ramp mode to try to help with the immediate 'shock' to the system but that only seemed to be a partial fix. In some matches our CRIO & radio lost power for very short periods of time, effectively taking us out of the remainder of the match as our CRIO rebooted & loaded robot code. We also have some wiring issues (battery & main breaker too far away from the PD board) that we need to fix that may help with this, but we're seriously considering removing 2 CIMs from our drive just so we can function properly at the St. Louis regional.

We also tried to be aware of which batteries we were using when we were having these issues on the field. One of the times we reset occurred while using a 2014 battery; all of our batteries are less than 3 years old & were load tested & shown to be in good condition.

Another mechanical option we're going to implement is removing our outside traction wheels & replacing them with omni wheels, making turning much easier on the robot. Hopefully the combination of all of these changes will yield better results for us at the St. Louis regional.