[Andy Grady]

Just a few tips for teams who may be having issues with the robot suddenly dying in a match...

1. Always make sure you have a fully charged battery in your robot. Keep in mind also that during a match, your battery voltage fluctuates immensely depending on the current draw of your robot. The more current you draw at one time, the lower your battery voltage will fluctuate. If your battery drops below 8 or 9 volts in a match (which is logged by FMS) you are highly suspect.

2. Always make sure you have full voltage on your Classmate. As well as all the latest software. If your classmate dies, you are dead in the water.

3. Try to secure your cables the best you can. Vibrations and shock to your robot can cause cables to jump and lose connection, or cause the Rio to reboot.

4. It is good practice not to run signal and power wires together. Keep them separate to reduce noise.

5. Try to put your gaming adapter somewhere in open space on your robot. The more internal to the robot, the better chance that you will lose signal.

6. Check your code! Make sure when you were fooling around with it that you didn't goof something up!

I know it can be very frustrating to teams when the robot goes dead, but you can greatly reduce your risk of anything happening by just taking care of your wiring. In two years with this new control system, to my knowledge, my team has never run into a communication problem with the field. I feel that is because we take extra care with the signal wires, placement of components, and absorbing of shock. Take it from me...I work with all these network cables and such every day. They get flaky just sitting by themselves over time. In a robot, they are subjected to tons of vibration and shock, which expedites degradation of the physical connection. Good wiring practices make a difference.