We recently competed in our first competition and we had some communication issues with our robot. We would do autonomous, and then get into teleop then about a minute in we lose connection our robot light goes solid and we are dead in the water.
We had really helpful orange and yellow hats that helped us throughout the compeition but we never quite figured out the problem, until right before our last match we had two revelations.
One was that we put in a new ethernet cable and it seemed to communicate beter. Next was the big one. We could knock
lightly on our radio and it would lose connection. We would get connection back but it did not seem that that worked when on the field.
We got a loaner radio and we could not replicate the knock test that would make us lose connection.
We are looking for help trouble shooting this issue as we would have done better in matches if we were able to stay on for the whole round. The 1 or 2 matched we stayed on for the entire time we did really well.
I can provide more information on anything that is needed so we can see if we can figure it out.
Other things we though our communication issues would be were:
- CPU on classmate laptop - tried 3 laptops and ruled this out
- CPU on roboRIO - Looked at logs and it seems like it should not be the issue.
- Programming issue in java that was creating a load on the roboRIO CPU - we looked at the code with 3 or 4 teams and officals and did not see anythign that could have caused it. The only thing that we had "checking" frequently was an ultra sonic sensor that we were not using so we commented it out.
- Battery connections - we checked and recrimped things as well as used other teams batteries and ruled this mostly out but we are double checking all connectors etc.
- Lose wires - checked and wiggle tested everything. Took any lose wire out and re tightened them.
- Radio that rebooted when we knocked on it - replaced with new radio that passed the "knock test"
We did walk away 23/40 and winning Rookie All Star. So we are super proud of what we did. Just would love to figure it out.
Thanks in advance!