Help tracking down a possible cause for robot disconnects

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by ahartnet

I think we were finally able to find and address the issue today. ...
4) Test run - still lose comm
5) Replace cable from battery to main switch
6) Add some mounts to reduce the vibration of the electronics board (it's mounted on some fairly thin lexan that could bounce significantly. It snapped near one of the mounting points which allowed more vibration on the side with the rio
7) Test run - drive without loss of comms for a while

Did you save the cable that you replaced? Someone might be able to look at the APP SB50 end of it and determine whether it has a defect that could cause your symptoms.

[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.

[ahartnet]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Did you save the cable that you replaced? Someone might be able to look at the APP SB50 end of it and determine whether it has a defect that could cause your symptoms.

Yes, we have the cables that were replaced. the SB50 end is not the suspect end, but rather the PDP side. We had some ultra flexible 4 AWG wire that we had wanted to use due to some tight spacing, but we had to trim some of the strands out to fit it in the ring terminal.

[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...