Intermittent connection on field only

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Brian,
Your last post is confusing, what are you trying to say? Are you saying I act with favoritism because I don't agree with your suggestions? With your methods or with your premise?
What are you referring to in the paragraphs about students and field teams?
I am suggesting that you use your monitors on your own robot on your practice field to give First and the community some data to digest and duplicate. Are you against that?
As to you having something on your robot during Monty Madness, that is up to you and the event staff.
As to First's reaction to your hardware, I have no knowledge of what you are relating to us. For the record I am not FIRST staff, I am not a member of the GDC, I am a key volunteer.
As to adding monitoring to a robot, may I refer you to StangSense. We used the control system in conjunction with a custom circuit, to monitor current/voltage to critical systems, mostly motors, using a method that did not interrupt the power pathways to electrical components on our robot. We also used that system in a mobile design to aid other teams in the pursuit of problems on their robots for several years. We also described the data we collected and the subsequent issues we observed to anyone who wanted them and that data aided in the design of the current PD power circuitry. FIRST added several test bed monitors to operating robots (including ours) during the design phase as well. I assisted with at least some of the interpretation of that collected data during the collection at IRI. The boost/buck regulators on the PD are a direct result (I believe) of that research.