Control System Issues

[Jon Stratis]

We lost our KoP sidecar at Lake Superior and had to replace it with one from a previous year. The 5V LED went out, and we lost all PWM signal. I figured some metal shavings got in there and shorted something.

But if you want to talk about confusing control system issues... Last night we were at our build space to practice driving on last year's robot. While the driver was practicing, the programming team was working on getting another robot up and running again so we can have some more interaction in the practice. Well, they accidentally downloaded (over wireless!) to the wrong robot! We spent at least half an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't driving anymore (rebooting both the robot and driver station multiple times, opening up the robot to look at the electronics, etc) before we discovered why.