The importance of testing

[Eugene Fang]

Team 604 does a few things to ensure robot reliability. Some of it is a lot of excess, perhaps unnecessary work, but it's served us really well this season; we haven't had a single "dead robot" issue. We probably would have gotten away with a lot of our precautions, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Before the competition:
-Design the robot to be robust and electronics to be clean. The latter helps greatly during the competition to debug any problems and reduce the risk of electrical failure.

During the competition in the pits:
-Pre-match power-on test and test all functions (We use an old battery, then switch in a new one)
-Keep a list of battery rotations

During the competition while queuing:
-Check the Classmate joysticks before each match (We're afraid that it won't hold USB1, USB2, etc.). As an FYI, if you go to the "Diagnostics" tab on the classmate, and pull the trigger of your joystick, the green LED under "USB Devices" should turn blue.
-Visually inspect the mechanical systems
-Check the tightness of the nuts holding the large AWG wires leading to the PDB

Once the robot is on the field:
-I push in every PWM on a victor, push the modules into the cRIO, and push any other small signal wire that might jiggle loose. It takes about 15 seconds, and I do it while the robot is booting up, so I don't get yelled at by the field crew =)
-Check the lights on the radio (for both power and Ethernet comms), any breakout boards, sidecar, and victors.