COMM lost way to many times

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Thad House

I would LOVE to see FIRST legalize opening up the Radio and soldering a power cable directly to the PCB pins. Not having a solid, locking connector is the biggest issue with the radio, and if teams could solder to create their own locking connector, maybe with a powerpole that would be great.

Why is everyone missing the obvious solution? Use passive Power Over Ethernet (POE) on the port that supports it. The Ethernet connector snaps firmly into place. I've never seen one come loose due to bounces or vibration this year.


On the other hand, more than half the robots I checked had loose terminals either on the battery or the main circuit breaker. All of the "lost communication" events I followed up on at both of the events I worked at were associated with a faulty power connection. All.

(I'm counting only ones where there was actually a loss of communication, not the few the drivers called "lost comm" but where the problem was that robot code crashed or a joystick came disconnected or the Driver Station was being interfered with by a software update process.)