Control System Issues

[Mastonevich]

Just wanted to share 2 problems 1987 had over the weekend.

1.
While the students were working in the pits on some minor coding, our driver station started randomly losing connection with the robot while it was tethered. It was as random as random could be.

We had our entire control system unplugged at one time or another. We would reboot the the robot and see if we had connection. I think the max number of reboots was 4 attempts, before we would simply not have robot communication. This entire process took us 4 hours and two missed matches.

We ended Friday by taking our driver station back to our shop (thankfully we were at our local regional this time) where we had a test electronics board setup. We were able to recreate the problem. Thanks to 1730, our sister team, for troubleshooting with us as they were in the pits with us and after heading back to our shop they brought over a backup driver station. 1730 was always able to connect to the test bed, but we were not. After an hour of doing this we noticed that our DS software was a little different version. I think we had the 1.28 release, they had the latest. We updated the DS which requires a reboot and after the reboot, all was well.

I think the reboot fixed our issue but we have nothing 100% concrete.

I am guessing others already reboot their driver station as part of pre-match setup, and it will certainly be part of 1987s pre-match procedures now.

It leaves me wondering could there be a memory leak with the DS software, either induced by something we did or just inherent? Other thoughts, ideas?

Setup: 1.28 DS software, C++ Code with WPI Library on current release

2.
We had to replace our digital sidecar twice during GKC. No idea why they were going bad, but they were. As I understand other teams went through digital sidecars during the regional also, but I did not personally see it first hand.