[Al Skierkiewicz]

Brian,
We are looking for all input with any electrical problems especially the controllers. We have been finding some interesting results after the many conversations with people. As Greg Ross has related in his post, the error checking on the download is not that great, but everyone is using it and it has very few problems.
What we have experienced is the substandard serial cables that many teams pick up. So frequently we were asked to come to a pit and help diagnose a problem, only to find a bad cable, or three or four cables strung together, or most often, a damaged cable. (i.e. nicks, sharp bends, electrical tape over a cut, etc.) Once the suspect cables were replaced (or borrowed) most problems went away.
Other problems that occurred were just dumb problems caused by the emotion of the time. During one match, our robot just sat still doing nothing during auto mode. Everyone thought that was our strategy but the reality was that an official thought something was wrong at the players station and hit reset on the field interface, that unset auto for our station and we did not reinitialize after that. We now recheck that the OI is reset properly and ready to initiate auto mode at the start of every match. Problem solved.
We also found some teams (especially during practice) are plugging in their controllers on the next field before the match starts. This sets their modems on and they try to handshake with the robots that are next to play. The result apparently is bad data packets. Apparently, if there is enough bad data packets, the interfaces shut down(failsafe)and the only way to correct it is to reset or repower. (I'll let someone else who knows elaborate on that process.) During Midwest Regional we were finding many instances of bad data all throughout the practice day. That pretty much vanished by game day, thankfully. We were able to find many teams who were powering up in the pits without tether and during practice, powering up the player side while another team was practicing. (Although we approached the teams and asked that they not run untethered in the pits, some continued throughout the weekend.) We were not able to put all the evidence together until recently. After discussions with Innovation First and all the teams that have had problems with communications (including us) we believe that most of the problems are due to multiple modems coming on. At nationals with four fields running four robots at the same time, it is a tribute to the control system (and Innovation First) that we did not have more problems.