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Unread 09-03-2008, 04:17
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AKA: Andy
FRC #2928
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Rookie Year: 1994
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Re: Electric Problems

I don't know if any of this will help, but:

1717 had what I think is a similar problem - they would be driving and then all four of their drive motors would blink out simultaneously. I believe they eventually fixed the problem, but I don't remember the solution. They were also noticing a difference between on tether with the OI running off AC power, on tether with the OI running of the robot's battery power, and on radio with the OI running off the competition port power.

980 was also having electrical problems - we'd be driving along and then the RC would just reboot (sometimes several times in a second) or randomly turn off relays. (This reeked enough havoc to our auton mode, that the ref gave us a warning and we decided not to run autonomous until we'd fixed the problem.) We discovered that the red wire to the Anderson connector on the robot was very warm, so we think we were getting an intermittent connection there. We also discovered that the ground wire to the backup battery was loose within the plastic housing (although the "bad backup battery" light never came on). We replaced the Anderson connector on the robot, fixed the loose backup battery ground wire, re-downloaded the master code to the RC, added some printf() statements to the user code, and the problem seemed to go away.
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