serious problem found - robot controller resets when jarred!

[Dave Flowerday]

Ken,
Are you sure the resets are due to the circuit breaker opening? I'm not surprised if the breakers open momentarily, but have you been able to run your robot into a wall or something and see it happen? There is a really monsterous capacitor inside the robot controller and I'd be a little surprised if it couldn't overcome a very momentary loss of power like that.

Our team has had some really solid hits to the walls both from autonomous and driver controlled and we've never seen resets due to shock like you describe. By any chance to these resets only happen on the ramp? If so it could be the static discharge that's getting you. There's another thread that Al from our team started about this problem. We also discovered that the reset pin on the RC is exposed through the programming port and is highly susceptible to noise. On our robot controller, merely having a serial cable plugged into that port and having it unconnected on the other side will put the RC into a constant reset state.