Field Issues

[Mark McLeod]

Radios:

• Radios mounted between/on-top-of/near the drive CIMs and/or buried deep in the robot metal lose communications when the robot starts to drive. Talk to the FTA before a match to ask him/her to watch the packet round trip time for your robot. Slow times (>20ms) probably mean the radio needs to be repositioned.
• Loose power connections to the radio. Even a momentary power drop from a robot sudden movement or collision loses field connection for at least a full minute.
• Radio power NOT coming from the special voltage dip protected Power Distribution Panel connection.
• When setting the WPA, plug in Ethernet before power.
• DLinks MUST be set to BRIDGE. Some tried AUTO, which eventually works, but only after the match is half over and the FTA had to bypass you to get the match started.

cRIO:

• Loose power connections. Tug gently on the power wires at both the cRIO and PD ends to see if they tug out.
• Image rev MUST be v28
• Sometimes, communications between the cRIO and DLink seemed to hold things up, but it's an easy fix and the FTAs handle that as second nature.

Driver Station:

• Wrong rev. Must be this year. Either 01.05.11.00 or 02.27.11.00 are fine. Older ones mean your robot will never link to the field.
• Check the cRIO rev here too. Image rev MUST be v28.
• Remain wary of misplaced joystick inputs. Check them by pushing a button and seeing them light up blue on the Driver Station Setup tab.
• Remain wary of the joysticks and Cypress appearing, BUT not getting enough power over USB to operate. Cypress should NOT share a USB port with anything else. The same is true for power hungry bells & whistles joysticks.

Field:

• The minibot tower's can give false positives when robots hit them hard in the endgame, so refs are scoring them by hand. FTAs are playing with the sensitivity.

General:

• Plugged in and charged batteries are always welcome.
• Powered up robots work well.
• Being in the correct player station works better.

I'll have to go through my notes to see what else.
The FTAs have their own more complete list of course. I was mostly in the pits and infrequently on the field watching a particular team with problems until the end.