Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
Steve,
You need to check everything following the breaker that feeds the window motor. You could have a bad speed controller, intermittent connection at the input or output of the controller or the motor itself. In some cases, a short in any of the input wiring to the frame of the robot can find it's way back to the Crio especially during hard robot frame hits. In some cases this causes a Crio reboot. You know how long that can take. You also may lose handshake with the wireless adapter. Could you see the RSL and can you tell us what the flash rate was during the outage?
The most sensitive wiring that could cause these faults are power wiring to the Crio, loose hardware on a controller, power wiring on the window motor, and power wiring on the DSC. I am going to bet that the two input connections on a speed controller are very close together. These touch with robot movements.
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I second everything Al says here. You have an intermittent short on that specific branch circuit somewhere. If it shorts to the frame and finds its way back to the cRio, as Al said it could cause a reboot. if your battery is a little low and it shorts, it may drop the voltage of the battery down low enough to cut power to the cRio, even temporarily, and cause a reboot.
If the robot was in the shop and you were able to spend some time with it, i would probably provide a nice list of trouble shooting steps here to help. however, you aren't, and you probably don't want to have to spend a lot of time with this in Atlanta. So i would recommend one simple thing: Replace everything on that branch circuit (wiring, speed controller, motor). You can have it all prepared and ready to go before you even show up, and just swap it all out. If possible, i would also change which ports you're using on the power distribution board, just in case the problem is there. Two years ago we had to do something similar between our first and second competitions. getting everything ready ahead of time made swapping things out a lot faster. Cut all the wire longer than you need - you can just wrap it up inside the robot somewhere.