Xbox Controllers

[Addison4300]

So, at Hub City, our drive team experienced our Xbox controllers disconnecting in the middle of a match causing our robot to uncontrollably continuing the action it was taking at the moment of disconnection. For example, we were driving forward to push a stack onto the scoring platform when the controller disconnected, then the robot continued to move forward causing us to knock the stack off the step and continue driving forward.

Does anyone have a suggestion/solution/input on this situation?

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Addison4300

So, at Hub City, our drive team experienced our Xbox controllers disconnecting in the middle of a match causing our robot to uncontrollably continuing the action it was taking at the moment of disconnection. For example, we were driving forward to push a stack onto the scoring platform when the controller disconnected, then the robot continued to move forward causing us to knock the stack off the step and continue driving forward.

Does anyone have a suggestion/solution/input on this situation?

This is what the watchdog module is designed to address. If a motor does not receive input with a certain regularity, it shuts off. How you access it depends on what language you use to program.

[Mark McLeod]

A couple of common causes:

• Keep your PC plugged into the power outlet at each Player Station to avoid having the laptop start power saving because it's on battery.
• Turn off power saving for the USB ports (and everything else for that matter)

Device Manager -> Universal Serial Bus controllers -> USB Root Hub -> Power Management
unclick "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

[GeeTwo]

You should still implement a watchdog in case of a physical disconnect of the controller, or a dropout of the field connection, which would have had the same effect. We've also implemented watchdogs on our non-competition devices, like our air cannon -- we have no desire to have 100+ pounds of robot running amok on the football field based on a joystick position from a minute ago!

[rich2202]

Originally Posted by Addison4300

Does anyone have a suggestion/solution/input on this situation?

One would think if the controller disconnected that the Class would return either: 1) 0,0 for joystick position (your robot should have stopped); or 2) some type of error code.

I should have our team check it out this week.

In any case, hitting "f1" on the driver station will have the computer scan for devices and reconnect the controller.

[FrankJ]

Drop of the DS to robot connection always disables robot. Loss of a controller disables the robot when not connected to FMS. The windows controller driver assumes the analogs are centered when the controller connects to window. So if you have an intermittent controller connection & you reconnect with the joysticks off center, you will get strange results.

[FrankJ]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

A couple of common causes:

• Keep your PC plugged into the power outlet at each Player Station to avoid having the laptop start power saving because it's on battery.
• Turn off power saving for the USB ports (and everything else for that matter)

Device Manager -> Universal Serial Bus controllers -> USB Root Hub -> Power Management
unclick "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

+1. This should be in the DS set up instructions if it not there already.

[techplex]

Consider strain refiling the USB cable. We had a similar issue where the driver would notice the controller being intermittent or disconnect altogether.

We used a wire tie and a sticky wire tie mount.


This makes sure that if the driver pulls on the cable the USB port does not wiggle or see the strain.

[Addison4300]

We had our laptop's power saver mode disabled.

Team 3310 said the Xbox controllers "burn out" a lot. (today our controller wont work at all now)

team 3310 also suggested to use a logitech game pad which we might try and see.

[BitTwiddler]

Originally Posted by Addison4300

We had our laptop's power saver mode disabled.

Team 3310 said the Xbox controllers "burn out" a lot. (today our controller wont work at all now)

team 3310 also suggested to use a logitech game pad which we might try and see.

Team 1726 is experiencing a similar issue with our Logitech gamepads "disappearing" from the DS during the matches. I don't think it's the Xbox controller per se (unless it's defective of course).