Continual Joystick Disconnect During Match

[java4first]

Hi -

We are having a really weird problem that hopefully someone can shed some light on ...

Thanks!
Stu


In a nutshell, during competitions - in a given match, the two joysticks will go 'disabled' at least once, and usually several times during the match teleoperated mode (they may be doing it in autonomous mode as well, but we obviously wouldn't be aware of it), halting active control of the robot and requiring the 'F1' rescan to bring them back to life. We have no problems at all when running tethered in the pits, or when running wirelessly during build season or during out of the bag practice sessions back home. Needless to say, it makes competing hard (and frustrating for the drive team).

More details:

- We are using Lenovo laptops (refurbished if that matters) running Windows 7 with patches current to the end of Build Season. We have no anti-virus or firewall software, and all three variants of the Windows firewall are disabled. We have a power management configuration that is set to never turn anything off when the laptop is powered on.

- We just competed at the Pioneer Valley District Event, and were not starting the FRC Driver Station program until we were connected to the field (which was a change from our normal procedure of coming ready to go - but that seemed to be causing problems for the field and we were asked to change).

- Because of the problems, we started doing a connectivity check of the two controllers after starting the Driver Station before each match started, and they were always green and flashed when you hit a button.

- We have an Ethernet coupler normally, but tried plugging directly into the laptop

- We are using two Logitech Dual Action gamepad controllers. At our last competition, we went out and bought two brand new ones to swap in, and it made no difference. We just bought to Xbox controllers to try at our next competition and see if that makes a difference.

- During the last match, we switched the tab to the one that shows the USB controller plugins - and when it fails, they go from green (connected / present) to grey ... until you run the F1 scan, when they return and go green again.

- We are running one of the Axis cameras at the default configuration for resolution and compression. We tried upping the compression and it didn't make a difference.

- If we look at the log file after the match, the data rate is down at the bottom of the graph, so I don't think it's a problem with communication bandwidth to the robot (although from what I have read in the FMS documentation, I don't see how the connection of the controllers could be affected by that anyway).

- We do notice what seems to be a correlation in spikes on lost packets at the times of the disconnects ... although I'm not sure whether it is related to the problem or caused by the F1 rescan process.

- The software on the robot isn't doing anything special or different from previous years in terms of just using the standard WPILib Java classes to instantiate and poll the controllers for stuff.

- There doesn't seem to be much correlation as to when it occurs, although in the match where we watched the USB tab, it seemed to happen right when the transition from autonomous to teleop occurred.

- It seems unlikely that it's related to the student driver & operator physical actions, as we never have problems at home and they are just as active with the controller motion in their hands there as at a competition.

If there is anything else I can look at or provide for information that would help troubleshoot this, let me know ... but we are really at a loss trying to figure out what the problem is. We do plan to bring several different laptops to our next competition and see if we can change that variable.