[techhelpbb]

Let's start from the bottom with this:

Please locate a multimeter with a Min/Max function, put it on your robot setup to measure minimum voltage DC and attach it to your battery lugs.

Then drive your robot around for 3 minutes (longer than a match) and see what the lowest voltage recorded is. Please post that here.

Then drive your robot around gently bumping stuff and see what the lowest recorded voltage is (similar to a situation with a field robot collision) and post that lowest recorded voltage here.

Generally a multimeter records voltages in Min/Max about 1,000 times a second. That's not bad considering the most (not all) critical electronic loads on the robot have additional capacitance which will ride through short drops.

Now once you achieve this, let's keep in mind that at high current you might have wiring somewhere that's too high in resistance (poor connections or an intermittent short). To test this put that same multimeter on the power inputs to these critical electronic devices (cRIO, radio, radio DC/DC converter, digital side car) again set to minimum voltage DC and repeat the tests above. Post that data.

With this in hand you are not depending on any aspect of your FIRST robot to measure the power supply critical to your robot. In fairness usually the driver's station charts will show voltage drops - but just in case there's something not right there this process I've outlined will show such problems as well.

Also I may have missed something but which programming language did your team use for your robot? C++, Java or LabView? Does your robot use vision?

Keep in mind that the field system does have some very real timing differences from other private wireless and wired robot situations. It's possible to cause yourself some headaches. This year I've seen problems with putting the Java camera get instance in the robot init section (this is a perfect example it only was an issue on the real field). I've seen problems with LabView and one team's attempt to use the standard compressor and pressure switch cause their robot to reboot consistently because LabView kept saying that relay 1 was an invalid index (clearly that's not an invalid index and strangely if you edit the block and set that directly it's fine for a bit and then the problem returns). Also with C++ you can easily shoot yourself in the foot (not so much a problem with C++ but just the nature having that much power it can blow up).

So I advise you even if you provide the voltages I request above to take your code and features apart starting at the most simple and adding on till you reach the full compliment. In this manner if one thing is causing headaches you can isolate which one(s) require more evaluation.