Fried program slots?

[Jeff Waegelin]

We were doing some autonomous mode testing with our 2002 robot yesterday, and ran into some major problems with our robot controller. We were trying to make a multi-slot program, and when we did, the robot went berserk.

It started last weekend, when we were doing some other auto mode testing. Whenever we removed the program cable after downloading a program, all the motors and pneumatics started randomly turning on and off. Shutting off the bot fixed the problem.

Other than that, everything worked fine until we tried to change program slots. When we loaded our multi-slot auto program, and used our dongle to start auto mode, the robot went crazy for about three seconds, then died.

Subsequent testing showed that numerous program slots were corrupted, and would return bad data when we tried to use them. This got worse and worse with each test, until the RC finally refused to communicate with our laptop.

Does anyone have any idea what would cause these problems? All of our single-slot programs worked fine, but multi-slot programs caused problems every time.