we participated in a FTC league championship over the weekend. Our team worked through all the functions that we set for our robot. We were able to cap the ball on the practice field but when we went out on the game field, everything died. My programming guy is saying we need new phones. Our phones have not been the problem before. It was usually connections which we solved by 3D printing the cable protectors available.
Has anyone else had similar issues with the ZTE phones? Is there a better but affordable option? (we are facing a last ditch regional after a dismal showing at our league championship). Should I just replace the batteries and keep a set of batteries charged as I would for my FRC team? I’m stumped and my team is frustrated again since we did not do on the real field what we did immediately previously on the practice field.
Any pearls of wisdom would help! I don’t want to leave my FTC team with a taste of “mess” at the end of their season. This has been the best team yet!
Steve,
Replace your USB cable from your phone to the core module. Those cables are temperamental and if you use them all season they can wear out. I am thinking it is likely that you have a loose cable connection that is fine when you are not being hit by another robot but looses connection during a match. It is a simple few dollars to try this and see if it fixes the issue.
I have noticed that there is a slight improvement with better phones on wifi stability, but my teams have used the ZTE speed the past two year and the only issues we are seeing now is the usb connection on the phone is wearing out. We are waiting until next year to make any changes to our phones since we only qualified one team to Arlington, we have plenty of spare parts if we need to tap into them.
Thanks Greg! I agree. I’m going to search for the usb retainers we 3dprinted last year or find the files on thingverse too. One of our team put them “somewhere” and cannot find them in our build area. We had several issues last year until we put in these retainers. If we can’t get this done, we’ll use the old fashioned Mark 1 Duct tape/zip tie solution. lol
Thanks again…Kudos to Rachel please! She’s been an angel for us this season. I’ll send you a vid of our ball capping contraption.