We have been trying to field test our robot, but we have been plagued with random communication losses. They usually occur when we try to move the robot. The driver station will lose communications and it does not reconnect unless we manually reset the robot. However, at times it will work perfectly, and other times it will disconnect as soon as we touch our joysticks. We have already done a wire check of all the jaguars and they seem to be in working order. Any ideas?
Well, when my team first tested out our drive train, we had many random communication loss too, only it happened more predictably. This happened either when we tried to move one of our joysticks back or when the bot managed to move a certain distance away from the driver station. I beleive our problem, and solution were actually quite simple. We just had to tighten some loose wires. I do not know if this is the cause of your problem, but I think it’s worth a shot investigating.
If you’re losing communication when you try to run your motors, it sounds like a power problem. Make sure you’ve wired your robot’s wireless adapter to its dedicated 12v power connection on the Power Distribution board, and not to a regular 20A circuit breaker.