[DougHogg]

Originally posted by Matt McNelley
Anyone who saw our first round of the finals at the Midwest Regional knows that we didn't function at all after sustaining an impact from another robot. It was thought at first that it was a battery problem, and that is what you heard from the announcer if you watched the webcast, or were there. Well, the problem was not a battery connection, or any other kind of external connection for that matter. Immediately following the round, we gave all the connections a thorough inspection, and could find nothing wrong with the robot. We were still getting power, but we had no radio communication. Well, one of the engineers gave the console a couple of taps and it came back to life. Something inside of the actual component of the radio equipment must have broken. Whatever it was, it definitely didn't help us out any.

Has anyone else had problems of this sort?

We had some similar and very weird problems last year where we would suddenly loose connection while at our school. Once we changed a fuse near the modem port and the problem went away, so we thought we had solved it.

Then just prior to the Summer Classic last summer, we had the same problem again and changing the fuse did nothing.

We then did a major rewire job with a different circuit breaker panel, and once again all went well.

Later, we had the same problem again. An additional symptom that appeared and seemed related was that our robot sometimes did strange random things, motors twitched off and on, the light went on and off, and these things occurred repeatedly and together. More than once, we had a cyclical connecting/ disconnecting occurring with the light going off and then on again every second or two, while the motors activated and deactivated. We also had the no data light turning on. It seemed like our robot was betwitched.

We tried a lot of different things to try to handle it. Finally we changed out the radio on the operator interface and since then no problem. This time, the solution seemed to be clear in our case, in that the problem kept occurring and then the second the radio was changed, it was gone and never came back. (We had tried tightening the connections from the radio to the operator interface and changing the radio wire, with no success.)

Hope the data helps in some way.

Good luck guys. I know it is not fun, especially during the finals of a competition.