[FTC]: Losing Control During Competition

[F Elliott]

I suppose this whole issue has been discussed and cussed quite a bit.

We've never had a problem with our robot's Samantha module or controlling it wirelessly. Saturday we lost control of our robot in 3 of 5 matches. Other teams were experiencing the same thing, including one team in the semifinals. In one case, we lost connection to our robot while it was just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. One station on one field seemed to be worse than the others but there was no clear pattern. It happened throughout the day.

Reading the forums I knew this was a problem area. Our Samantha is mounted on its own mast away from everything. It's cabling is stress relieved and tie wrapped. It is powered on its own dedicated feed off the Anderson Powerpole RIGrunner distribution box. We've done everything we can think of. The FIRST representatives looked it all over and agreed we were doing everything they could think of.

We can't get it to fail here at school and we couldn't get it to fail in the pits. We bounced the robot, jiggled cables... everything we could think of. No issue.

We get on the floor, autonomous fires up and then sometime during teleop the blue light goes out and we are dead until it recovers, at which time it usually died again.

Everyone was telling us it was the Samantha module or the field wireless system. It seems to me if the blue light goes out but we still have white, then the problem is between Samantha and the NXT or a power glitch. I'm now wondering if it's a problem with our NXT but I have no way to test that and in any case we can't get it to fail anywhere else.

What are we missing?