Answered: Cortex connection fluctuating

At the Toronto competition, we suffered communication problems throughout. The robot would lose connectivity anywhere from 1-4 times a match, with a duration of about 10-20s each time.

Using the Cortex 2.0 (NC 1), and programming in RobotC, we tried a few possible solutions unsuccessfully:

  • Using 9V Backup Battery - wasn’t used for much of the competition, but adding it didn’t seem to resolve any issues.
  • 5ms wait in main loop - reccomended to us by a team who had been having similar difficulties, but didn’t solve our specific problem.

The loss of connection doesn’t seem to be related to power draw, and my only thoughts at this point are that we’ve heard of bugs in the NC1 version of the controller.

Thank you for your consideration.

How do you know that you were losing Link? Have you updated your ROBOTC Software? Have you updated the Master Code using the Upgrade Tool? Have you upgraded both the CORTEX and Joystick?

The feedback lights on the controller would flash red, followed by the green/yellow re-connecting lights.

We are using ROBOTC 2.26 (8.19).

Master Code had been updated, but I will try re-updating everything again.

The current version of ROBOTC is 2.3. So try updating your ROBOTC Software, then use the Upgrade Tool to update the Master Code in both the Joystick and Cortex. Also update the firmware.