I’m Angela from team 599, the Robodox. At our recent regional, our drive controls started switching up. We didn’t change anything and the drive code was working the day before. The very next day the controls started switching. For instance, hitting the forward button would cause the robot to turn left and the backwards button would go right. In the same enable, the buttons would suddenly switch and forward would become backward and backwards would cause the robot to turn right. None of the other subsystems had their buttons switched. None of the code was touched.
Has anyone had similar issues and found a solution?
We think we identified the problem: Our drive has two Neos on each side and apparently during a pit thrash at last weekend’s comp to repair a gearbox, the encoder wires were switched between the Neos/Sparks. We only had about 10 minutes to validate this evening so we’ll be on the lookout for any further glitches. When we’re convinced, we’ll post back here. This is a good mental toolbox lesson. There were so many possibilities, it was hard to narrow down and unfortunately borked our comp performance.
The theory is that incorrect signals were freaking out the commutation scheme. Maybe because the motors are ganged together it was a marginal discrepancy causing the problem to be variable and intermittent.
OK, we’re convinced now - the crossed encoder wires was the problem. We’ve had zero issues since correcting them.
So if you have multiple Neos ganged together (like in drive), cross-connecting the encoder wires is going to make it run haphazardly, not stop it all together.