Robot loses communication while going over obstacles

When my team drives our robot everything works fine. When we drive over obstacles we lose communications. We checked all of our wires and we detected no problems. Does anyone know any other reasons why this would occur.

We think it could possibly be a brown out issue, but we are unsure how to solve it.

Router browns out with multiple CIMS driving WCD

A lot of good info in the above thread.

Dr. Joe J.

We had the same problem last year. It was a very slightly loose crimp on our battery lug. We thought our wiring was fine… And the behavior wasn’t repeatable when we shook the robot off field… But consistently happened when we drove over the platforms.

You might want to triple check the connections to the battery and/or other power connections that “look” OK, but might be intermittent under mechanical shock. You can always try the shake test… But in our case we still didn’t see the problem.

If you really suspect brownout, you can look at the robot logs for battery voltage to see if it gets low.

Very frustrating… Hope you get it solved.

Multiple teams were having the same problem at our scrimmage yesterday including ourselves. We discovered that the bridge power connector can sometimes wiggle loose during a match and cause the bridge to reboot when it experiences some shock from an obstacle. We fixed ours with a ziptie stretching around our bridge to hold the power connector tightly in place.

Our team had the same problem. For us, it was just a loose roboRIO power wire that wouldn’t stay in the PDP (though it looked like it was fine).

A lot of possible solutions were posted in a similar thread about a week ago; it’s probably worth a read: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1540609

All closely related threads:

Power draw issues

Battery Voltage problem

Voltage Drop issues

Robot loses communication while going over obstacles

Router browns out with multiple CIMS driving WCD