We are in the Engineering Division. Our practice match and 3rd qualifier worked perfectly on field 3. However, our first and second qualifiers were on fields 1 and 2, and the autonomous ran a completely random unwritten program, which consisted of the lift motors pushing down and consequently burning out the motors. After that in driver’s mode, the robot begins to drive for a few feet without any joystick input, and soon stops and only allows the driver to control the lift and intake. We took the robot to Tech Support, and they said there was nothing wrong with the code. We also went to the field people, and they told us that our code was bad and the fields were all identical.
We saw that 5150D was having problems too. Any ideas on why only field 3 works for us?
I remember having a similar problem at worlds this one time. The field tech people advised us that it could have been electric static being built up in the integrated motor encoders or something after walking on the fluffy worlds carpet. You know that red carpet on the ground? If you’ve been walking your robot on it, you may have charged it up and bugged with the encoders.
I took an allen wrench with me ever since and just tapped my robot with it before the match starts so it would discharge the electricity onto it instead of zapping me myself.
We’ve changed the joystick, microconttoller, and keys and updated all of them.
We’re using IMEs, so this is probably the problem. I decided to use quad encoders next year since they are more stable than IMEs, as we’ve found that IMEs sometimes skip some steps every so often. We’ll try the Allen wrench idea tomorrow. Thank you for the quick replies.
We had issues like that last year. We finally went away from IME’s this year for pots and quad-encoders and all has been well.
Why they have carpet surrounding the arenas is beyond me, probably something they should rethink or get ESD free carpet mats. They do spray the fields though from what I understand for ESD.