Robot Controller & Operator Interface troubles

[ErikJusten]

We had an odd problem at National's where it looked like the controller wouldn't power up properly (it was stuck in some odd state where all the led's would blink). According to a guy from Innovation FIRST (sorry, I don't remember the name), they were having problems where a crystal was out of spec and causing problems at cold tempertures. After a few prodding questions I became less convinced with this answer, but the problem did go away as the day got warmer. Perhaps if they had a bad enough design to have their timing diagram waveforms be effected by cold, it could have been by heat as well.


But...... my money is on interference, or a bad cable. A week or so ago we were getting a random "no data" light, though sometimes the light (and thus the controller state) would oscillate for several seconds. My guess here was a bad cable - this problem has since gone away with a different cable.