Consistent robot flicker every 64 seconds

[Ken Streeter]

Phil,

I haven't been able to track down the root cause yet, but, for what it's worth, you're not alone. We saw this problem (periodic dropout every 68-ish seconds, lasting only a couple seconds each time, according to the DS log) last night on 1519's practice robot. I don't recall having ever seen it before.

I'll investigate further tonight and let you know what we find out. We have many hours of DS logs on the driver station laptop that we can look through (including logs from Week 1 and Week Zero tournaments) to help see if the problem is caused by other things in the environment. I am quite certain we were NOT having this problem on the competition field at Week 1, as I had been looking at the DS logs for our robot at the tournament with an FTA to troubleshoot a different problem and didn't see this behavior in those logs.

For what it's worth, we're in a somewhat different programming environment, so I'm a little skeptical that the problem is in the robot code. It also sounds like you got the problem to go away by switching laptops, so it seems likely that the problem is induced by something on the laptop. Our DS is running Windows 7 and we are running Java on the robot, but are getting a very similar periodic glitch.

--ken