Help tracking down a possible cause for robot disconnects

[phargo#1018]

Can you elaborate on the conditions at your demonstration even?

I have seen communications drop-outs at demonstration events for a number of years. Most years, our team has been forced to tether the robot to operate the system. This year's game makes tethering nearly impossible.

I have a thread, under 'Technical Discussions', that describes the problems I have seen, comments from others, and the corrective action we took for a demonstration event last weekend.

Hope that this helps!

[ahartnet]

Originally Posted by phargo#1018

Can you elaborate on the conditions at your demonstration even?

We were using the offseason FMS on a 5 Ghz I believe. It was at the Houston Comicpalooza, so if it were only comm issues I'd feel pretty comfortable trying to blame the environment. Other than that, the environment wasn't any different than you'd expect from a offseason or in-season event. Real field components, real carpet, etc.

Originally Posted by Team34Guy

The barrel power connector can sometimes momentarily lose connection when it's jarred. This can cause your comms to shut down for close to a minute while the radio reboots. We had this happen in competition.

Yes - our barrel connection was really bad. We changed over to PoE. For awhile we had both the PoE and the barrel connector - but found that we could get radio resets with both plugged in. Using only the PoE reliably kept power to the radio when we would manually try to do vibration tests. I also didn't see the radio go through what I believe is it's power cycle sequence. That doesn't mean there's not a bad internal connection however that could keep power while losing connection

Originally Posted by tr6scott

So did you?
Are you using 2.4GHz?
Did you try 5GHz?

We did not use the wifi analyzer app. I will try to do that next time I'm at the school. Once we got the rio to stop resetting and we kept comm, I was pretty anxious to head back to work. I didn't even think to look at the rio logs/lost packet count until I was on my way out. I might look into getting a 5 Ghz adapter if it looks like the 2.4 Ghz is a problem at the school, but it's at least a good enough evironment to drive and test in.

[Citabria42]

Well we had the same problem. We were having cutouts on our communications as well. After 2 regionals and a few demos, we found out that we actually were given a smaller barrel pin for the barrel jackon the radio. the barrel jack is 2.5mm and the pin was 2.1mm. We later talked to officials and they said that there was a mix-up with more than a few K.O.P's. we just simply replaced the pin to the correct size and got consistent communications. Unfortunately, it was way after season...