pic: Daisy Bell Going Over The Bump

[Jon Jack]

Originally Posted by jason701802

Did you guys ever figure out what was causing the random shutdowns in the finals in Salt Lake?

No we have not figured out what exactly is causing these issues. We thought we had fixed them at Championships, but they reappeared again at IRI. It's currently at the top of our off-season engineering to-do list.

As for shock absorbing...
When the robot was initially designed we kept this in the back of our mind. The first time the practice robot went over the bump was quite an interesting experience. The cRIO nearly ripped itself off the electronics board, the analog breakout flew off the robot, the router reset itself...

Afterwards, while making repairs to the electronics board, we put a layer of rubber over over the cross members where the electronics board mounted to. I don't know how big of a difference it really made.

We tried mounting the gateway on rubber as well, but during our 3rd match in San Diego the gateway reset itself. We decided to take a piece of polycarb, break it and mount the radio vertically. This worked much better and we had no issues with the gateway resetting itself for the rest of the season.

Another thing I will finally say is that during San Diego QF2-2 we sheered a 7075AL output shaft in one of our transmissions (Picture can be found here). It just so happened that a transmission output shaft was one of the shafts we did not have spares for in San Diego. So we removed the broken shaft, took a spare shaft from a different part of the robot and "MacGyvered" it in place. The whole operation took about 15 minutes - we didn't even have to use a timeout...

The robot ran through the next two semi-final matches without a glitch - still able to go over the bumps as though nothing was wrong. Thursday morning in Utah (our next regional) we completely rebuilt both sides of the drivetrain with new (redesigned) shafts and sideplates.