Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
The reality is there have been enough root-caused issues with both robots and the field that both should be suspected when an issue occurs.
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Any good troubleshooter will suspect everything. I witnessed some of those FMS reset issues, so I know it's not faultless.
The problem is of course that there are far too few troubleshooters who straddle the fence and can unemotionally examine both sides, and aren't consumed by official duties. I've always been able to find a problem with the robot that solved the issue (last year and this year), as long as I'm there to examine the status lights and diagnostic messages. Even with wireless bridge failures the statistics page on the bridge usually tells that story, as long as I can prevent the team from turning their robot off after failing in a match. That doesn't mean I don't list FMS as a potential culprit every time. In fact that's always the first consideration, because it needs to be checked immediately while the problem is occurring. FMS failures tend to take the whole field down, or one entire end, or a single driver station eStop might fail, but it's pretty obvious to the field crew when that happens.
You can't actually solve a problem unless you can divorce yourself from taking sides. If you find yourself blaming something you know nothing about, then that's not troubleshooting and it won't solve the problem.
One of the issues I've noticed this year and last is that teams look on the NI reps as experts in the whole system, whereas, they typically are not. They are all experts in LabVIEW, many in cRIO operation, some work with teams and know the whole FRC control scheme, but few of them know anything about FMS.