It looks like there's been a lot of discussion on the radio, breaker, connectors, etc. being the issue. I think the likely culprit here isn't the PDP, but rather the VRM.
At the NC Wake County event, I helped out a team (5544 I believe) that had a failed VRM. The symptoms were:
- Both VRM lights were solid.
- The wires connecting the VRM to the PDP were solid and passed the tug test.
- The VRM and PDP were properly mounted.
- The Radio properly booted when the robot was idle.
- The VRM was located on the opposite side of the robot to the Radio.
We discovered that whenever the team drove the robot in the pits, the radio would enter a boot loop (radio power light flickering at a high frequency, not the ~2 Hz blinking you see when programming the radio). The final point shown above is important because many teams don't realize that this is an issue.
The VRM is
very noisy. Locating it anywhere near your radio will cause increased packet loss and trip time. Another team at the same event reported laggy controls and communication issues. They mounted their VRM under their radio and the logs showed a direct correlation between current consumption and packet loss. The VRM is also
very low cost. The testing I described would have never been done had teams not been given a reason to suspect the VRM. I believe the root cause was that the team had an external circuit (LEDs) connected to the VRM for some time and the constant current draw damaged the VRM electronics.
I highly recommend that, once the debugging procedures outlined by many others in this thread has been performed, try swapping the VRM and see if that solves the issue. In subsequent events I attended (NC Guilford, NC Wake, NC Asheville) the rate of teams having radio issues has plummeted mostly due to awareness and meticulous checking on behalf of the robot inspectors, CSAs, FTAs, and FTAAs. While I do believe that steps could have been taken to decrease the number of radio issues seen on the field, I also believe that teams & mentors should learn from these issues and test their robots under competition conditions wherever possible.