[Charlie B]

We physically removed the transmission, with drill motor and Chip, from the robot, (no electronics), and hooked them up to our 2002 Pbasic controller and Victor 883's. The Chips still skip. Two possible explanations I can think of...
1. the drill motors are backdriving the Chips and freaking out the Victors. But, Innovation FIRST says that the Victors shouldn't care, our ratio is 3.5:1, which is very close to the ratio we used successfully last year, and I remember feeling the Chip twitch while holding it my hand, out of the gearbox. Maybe I was hallucinating from fatigue. We'll see if we can get it to fail outside of the gearbox again, and we'll try loading the Chip to get it to work harder.

2. noise. PWM's and power cables are in close proximity on both this year's robot and our 2002 robot. It seems unlikely that we could so easily duplicate a noise problem on a completely different set of electronics, but maybe it's so. We'll try moving wires to separate power from signal.

If anyone has any ideas, we're all ears.