Odd Electrical Problems at The Championship

[Chaos in a Can]

We had a similar problem. Our datalogger stopped working, so we couldn't check the voltage during a match, but during our last two matches, our robot would suddenly stop responding to the drive controls.
It looked like it was trying to move, but didn't have the power to move.
We're going to see if we can reproduce this behavior once we get back home, (we were going to test the bot on the practice field after a match where this happened, but it was being taken down) so we have no idea what is causing the problem.

Also, our robot seemed quite sluggish on the competition field compared to when we ran it on the practice field and barely comparable to when we built it. The problem may only appear after the robot runs for a while, which may explain why it worked fine on the practice field, but the problem almost seems to be related to the competition field.

We'll definitely for voltage drops and chain problems.

[RyanN]

We had similar problems as well... When we would drive from forward to reverse real quickly, it would reset the controller, even though the backup battery was charged and present. I checked all electrical connections, and everything seemed good, but it kept on doing it. We never did solve that problem, we just avoided the problem.

Another issue we had was in our last match, our right drive was not running at full performance, and we found that one of the motor leads going to the victor was lose.

Our IR board never did work in Atlanta. We couldn't get it to work very well even with our remote only an inch or so from the sensor, however it would sometime work, but never in a match...

Oh well... Thanks for a good year FIRST.

[JesseK]

Our "electrical" problem turned out to be a mechanical problem as well. We had replaced the AM SuperShifter shroud with nylon spacers and lexan. We also attached our chain tensioners to the bolts that bolt together the top of the supershifter. As we tightened the bolts for the tensioners, the top of the transmission would decrease its gap between the plates. It turns out the gap at the top of the transmission was a whole 1/32" too small, causing the main gear the CIMs turn to bind up. We loosened the tensioner bolts on either side and immediately noticed a 3-4fps increase and much longer battery life. We did all of this right before our 2nd match of the day on Friday and nearly gave 1114 a heart attack by almost missing our match

Lessons learned: when trimming off weight from your drive train, some things just simply cannot be replaced.

Surprisingly enough, the AM hubs and flat AM aluminum sprockets that served as our main drive sprockets off the transmissions came away from 3 competitions completely unharmed!