[KrazyCarl92]

Team 5811 experienced issues with both radio and RoboRIO reboots at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional in Week 2. In about a third to half of our matches, we would be dead on the field for some period of time. We made an action plan for our Week 5 event at QCR to mitigate these issues, assuming that power connections to the concerned components was the root cause.

1. We had been using ferrule crimps on our RoboRIO power connection. After being eliminated in Pittsburgh, I had the opportunity to thoroughly check Team 3138's beautiful wiring where I noticed that they were using ferrules on every single connection EXCEPT the RoboRIO power connection. They stated that the clasp that screws in from the side only gets a single point of contact with a ferrule connector (due to the way the ferrule connector does not seat nicely within the RoboRIO), but that bare stranded wire actually provides a superior connection in this instance. Easy enough: we would trim our ferrule crimp off those wires, trim, then strip to establish a better RoboRIO power connection.

2. We noticed at Pittsburgh that the Radio barrel connector for power was at best a "janky" connection, causing us to lose radio power every so often during normal play. To mitigate this failure, we decided to try Power Over Ethernet (PoE) as supported by the Radio. We prepared a wire with the appropriate pinouts labeled prior to the event. Unfortunately, the wiring diagram from Team 3015 that we were using was vague, and used both solid and dashed lines to indicate which pins should be powered on the Ethernet cable. We decided to try the solid lines only first for fear of blowing out the radio (12V power to pin 4, Ground to pin 7 from the VRM 2A circuit). Voila! it worked in the pits and the radio was turning on! Unfortunately, we went to the field for the very first practice match and the robot would not connect. We then decided to use the dashed lines in the wiring diagram as well to test out how that would work (12V power to pins 4 & 5, Ground to pins 7 & 8 from the VRM 2A circuit). This did not lead to better results, and upon testing it turned out that the pins on the Ethernet connector and the wire itself for pin 5 did not have continuity (not sure why, faulty cable I suppose). At this point, we didn't have extra Ethernet cables to spare and didn't want to waste other teams' cables testing, so we decided to take another approach...

3. At Greater Pittsburgh we had attempted hot gluing the barrel connector to the radio on Saturday. This seemed to work! We had no further failures of radio connections on the field (all other failures were RIO failures, per the driver station logs). However, when we unbagged the robot at QCR, the hot glue had worn out and the barrel connector was loose again. After we did not achieve success with the PoE solution (lack of resources, not to say the solution itself doesn't work), we decided to go back to the barrel connector for radio power and attempt using a rubber band instead of hot glue to hold in the barrel connector securely. This rubber band wrapped around the back of the barrel connector and the opposite side of the radio to hold the barrel connector in place. I was at first nervous about the extra forces and potential bending loads on the connector, but this seemed to do the trick.

We are happy to report that after successful implementation of solutions 1 & 3, our robot had zero connection failures at QCR! This allowed us to successfully breach the outerworks in every single match, and increase our boulder scoring output.

We've learned a lot through this experience that we will hopefully be able to put to good use to help other teams keep their robots alive during their matches. I would almost even suggest implementing these as inspection standards so teams can only pass inspection with these solutions implemented.

TL;DR: We love ferrule connectors, and they belong on just about every other possible connection except the power on the RoboRIO; bare wire is best there. The barrel connectors that come in the KOP for radio power are ill-suited to the rigors of FRC (especially this year's game); use PoE, hot glue, or a rubber band to mitigate the risk of your radio losing power. It is important that teams be aware of solutions that may help their robots stay alive.