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More detail...
I'm on Jeff's team, and wanted to add a little bit of detail I feel relevant.
Before we started having multi-slot programming, we did have a few problems.
- When we tried to upload a program, the BASIC stamp would sometimes refuse to communicate. We had loopback and echo from the program port, but it would not give in ID or accept a program. When we unplugged after this happened, all the motors and relays went completely random.
- Occaisonally, the p1_y axis, which should be linked with our drive system, took the place of p3_y, which controlled an arm. Input from p3_y was ignored. This was corrected by resetting the robot.
- Once or twice, I heard / saw one of the arm actuators randomly move, even when the robot was in disable.
After attempting to load a multi-bank program, it ran until the RUN statement and then stopped. We had made a bunch of different autonomous programs, and we were trying to load each of them into their own bank and then use the selector switch to run them. Code looked something like this:
if auton_mode = 1 then
if (Prog = 1) AND (Side = 1) then RUN 1
if (Prog = 1) AND (Side = 0) then RUN 2
if (Prog = 2) AND (Side = ....
endif
'Code to get the input from the OI while in disable
I know that the correct RUN command was being executed through output provided by DEBUG statements.
Later, I wrote a program that looked like this:
a.bsx (slot 0)
DEBUG "a"
RUN 1
b.bsx (slot 1)
DEBUG "b"
RUN 2
c.bsx (slot 2)
DEBUG "c"
It ran fine on an older bot (2000), but on our 2001 bot all it outputted "abc" the first time, but if I did the reset button it outputted a plus-or-minus sign, than a superscript 2 followed by a superscript 3. Turning the RC off for a minute and turning it back on would yield "abc" the first time, and then would result in plus-minus to the 23 when we pressed the reset button.
Also, I noticed that sometimes I would have to download the program into the computer multiple times. WIth a 3 bank program (0-2) slots 0 and 2 would go to 100%, but 1 would remain at 0% on the download status screen.
One thought that I have (Jeff doesn't agree) is that we noticed that our battery voltage was 13.8V coming into the RC. Is it possible that the RC is overclocked? The warning level on my computer for a 12V current is 8% off, and we're running about twice that.
One reason I'm inclined to think that it may be overclocked is that all of the problems we're having can be linked to memory corruption. When one overclocks a computer or runs the voltage a bit hot, the first thing to go wrong is usually for the computer to give "Access violation" errors, where the computer goes looking for RAM that it doesn't have, or can't reliably access that RAM. If anyone has eer seen a poorly overclocked video card, while playing games it tends to flicker and the textures are corrupted since the address the game asked for wasn't the address it got.
On Monday, I plan to take a poorly charged battery and hook it up to see if we get the same errors.
Does anyone have any ideas? Does the overclocking theory sound reasonable? If so, what can we do about it?
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