Quote:
Originally Posted by sabruce01
Has anyone experienced this during competition? I know in OKC there were a few that had problems. Our team lost communications 5 of the 8 qualification rounds. Our bot would simply quit in the playing field. I spoke with nearly everyone there and got nowhere. Everything they told us to check had already been replaced in the pit. Auto would be fine, then about 1/2 way through tele, we would loose communication. During our last elimination round we didn't even have an auto which caused us to be eliminated. There is no way we were loosing power to the receiver. We troubleshot that to death and could not get it to fail. But that always seemed to be the default answer I got when asking around.
Any suggestions??? Anybody experience the same?
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We did not, but a lot of teams at GSR did. Here's what we did, that may have contributed to our seeming immunity to the comm issues:
1> Mounted the Wi-Fi on the robot away from all high EM fields (motors) and Faraday cages (steel). Orientation does not seem to be an issue but location is important.
2> Kept good care of our ethernet connectors (both on the DS and on the robot). We inspected them for bad spring pins, made sure we inserted the connector straight, and made sure no debris got into them.
3> Grounded the DS chassis as requested by FIRST.
4> always had our DS fully booted before booting the robot.
5> all electronics are mounted on non-conductive surfaces.
After some observations, I believe that #5 above is the culprit for most teams. Our robot (with it's propellers and wheels) generates a tremendus amount of static when on the regolith. We saw at least 2 machines have a 'No Comm' failure after an impact with our robot. My recomendation to all teams is to ensure that the robot chassis is isolated from all electronics.