ARENA Fault

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by kylelanman

A common response that I have heard is "After reviewing the log of the entire match nothing seems out the ordinary so the match will not be replayed". How is 1 to 4 robots loosing coms not something wrong? Something is clearly wrong. Thousands of fans can tell with out looking at a log that something went wrong.

Something obviously went wrong. It is not obvious that what went wrong has anything to do with the ARENA. If it was really an issue of losing communication, the FMS logs would confirm that to be the case.

More than one team has replaced their WGA and seen their troubles go away. That's not an ARENA fault. More than one team has confirmed problems with reading joysticks and/or the Cypress board after letting their Classmate go to sleep or when running low on battery power. That's not an ARENA fault either.

Team 45 lost a qualification match when the robot appeared to disable itself midway through autonomous, showed that it was re-enabled at teleop but with the drive motors nonresponsive, and sat there not moving for the rest of the match. Obviously a communication failure, right? Wrong. The diagnostic lights were green the whole time. The real fault was the battery we used for that match, which decided to die sometime between having been charged and the start of the match. (In that case, the FMS did pick up on the low voltage issue, and so did the drive team who knew what to look for on the Driver Station.)