ANNOUNCING: navX MXP Robotics Navigation Sensor

[slibert]

Originally Posted by Shahil_FRC

We had a similar issue this past weekend in our QF2 match in autonomous. We believe there was a spi bus or gyro error which led to a value of 0 being returned continuously. This issue caused our robot to enter an uncontrollable spin and the FTA disabling our robot for the remainder of the round. I feel bad for our alliance partners because this issue did not let us move forward to the SF. We could have returned to open loop control upon start of teleop.....

Been thinking about what could be causing this issue.

Over the last few days extensive brownout testing w/SPI has been going on; no matter what scenario we throw at it, the LabView SPI library and the navX MXP keep recovering.

However, there was an update to the navX MXP firmware back on Jan. 20 this year that fixed an issue in the navX MXP where it would hang if it encountered a UART error (which could be caused by electrical noise). Since the UART on the navX MXP is always active (as long as the UART dip switch is enabled), and if you didn't have this firmware fix, the navX MXP could lock up even if SPI is being used.

The latest version of the firmware is v. 1.0.482. You can display the firmware version number using the "Magnetometer Calibration Tool".

If you do have a version earlier than v. 1.0.482, directions for upgrading the navX MXP firmware are here.