cortex/joystick thoughts and problems

VEX V5 Technical Support UNOFFICIAL Tech Support
#1

we had a competition today, and a lot of teams have had problems with the system.

my purpose of this post is to discuss solutions and problems happening to other people.

my problems are:

  1. the wifi keys are over heating. (have you ever been programing for a few hours and find that you loose a connection, and it happens 30 seconds after resetting? this happens to me, and what do i do? i switch out the keys and it works for another few hours) are these defective keys? or a firmware/cortex/joystick issue? (it happens on both)

  2. we were tripping the breaker in our cortex a lot! in the middle of a match too! this seems to happen a lot when on the field with the field controller set up. we drove it for around 20 minutes off the court and for about 1min and 20secs on the field. is this the field? or what? i had spent time at the competition re arranging motors and adding a power expander and the problem still occurred. i then removed the 9 volt battery(as suggested by someone who solved their problem that way) and our problem seemed to not happen.
    what is the point of the 9 volt? we always have fresh batteries and don’t loose connection(with cool keys)

  3. joystick batteries, during our competition we had been running 2 joysticks, and we did NOT have to ever charge our batteries, a interesting technique is to link both joysticks to the cortex then to switch the key over after every match, i did this and we had GREEN lights all day.

i will be posting the problems above on official answers and will update accordingly

please post your problems and we can hopefully work together on some of these solutions

#2

we had problem #1 constantly when we were trying to program with cortex
that had forced us to use USB-USB programming and at the end, abandon cortex altogether

#2 were you “pushing/shoving” another robot in the match?
or did your autonomous trip a breaker? (drive fwd for 20 secs for eg)

the #3 technique is interesting
now teams wont need 4 sets of batteries for each team :wink:

#3

oh, and this probably makes a difference, i programmed the robot using robot c which downloads code in about 1-2 seconds over wifi which will use less power and create less heat, probably lowering our “over heating” problem.

#4

  1. this is a very common problem. what some teams did is use a usb extension cable (yes, it is legal https://vexforum.com/t/answered-cortex-vexnet-connection-problems/18040/1)

  2. this issue is not with the cortex, but with the new high strength motors. They use so much power, that having more than one on a circuit breaker will risk a trip. the best solution is to gear these motors for power instead of speed, and if that doesn’t work try replacing some of the motors with regular ones.

  3. I have not come across this problem, as the batteries in my joystick have lasted me about a week.

#5