[FTC]: External Battery Not Connected??? HELP?

[FTC6389]

I sent the following to RobotC tech support. I am reposting it here in hopes that someone out there has found a solution...

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We are experiencing an issue in which robotc thinks our external battery is not connected after our teleop.c program runs for a variable amount of time. If we run our program in debug mode, and bring up the "System Parameters" debug window, at first the "externalBattery" variable will show some value like 12.8V or 13.0V. But after some time, not always the same amount of time, the value of externalBattery will show "Not Avail". At this point, while the rest of the debugger windows make it look like all is well, no commands from the joysticks have any effect on the robots motors. The only way to remedy this state is to power cycle the robot.

We have tried everything we can think of. We have searched the web and found a couple references to other teams having the same issue.

Could this be due to our NXT unit running an old firmware version? Our NXT unit says it is running v955, but we think maybe this is an old version??

Could this be a bug in RobotC? We are running v3.5.4

We made sure we were using fully charged external battery.

We made sure the NXT has fully charged.

We made sure all power wires going to the motor controllers are well seated and not shorting out.

Please Help if you can, our Regional FTC competition is this Saturday (2/23/13)

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