As anyone who has been to a competition knows, people are always forgetting to plug in their power expander! This often causes even the best of teams to lose important matches. But I have a solution, and it’s not even very hard to implement. The power expander has and always has had a status port to check on it’s status. The solution is to simply have your autonomous routine check if the power expander is on by checking the status port, if the power expander is on, run the autonomous routine. If not, don’t run it. This will cause your robot to never move in autonomous if your power expander isn’t plugged in. The ruling says that if your robot didn’t move in autonomous, you can plug in things or turn things on.
TL;DR: use the status port on the power expander, it’s there for a reason.
Sometimes the first line of defense fails and other countermeasures are required.
There was serious discussion why the failure happened and from that countermeasures were set in place.
In this case i think the pins were a little funny (maybe the clip is broken, idk), it doesn’t matter. Generally operation critical systems will have multiple redundant systems to insure it remains operable. We determined that such a failure is possible and that implementing a secondary system was unobtrusive and effective. so they did it.
The whole thing was a text book example of problem solving and counter measuring. Great resume stuff.
Yeah, I am just always genuinely confused when this topic comes up because I have never had an issue. That being said, I’m sure I will lose an important match because my power expander is not plugged in.
If the wires are broken/wonky, I can entirely see something like this happening. But then, not running an autonomous routine in order to plug it in, well… It’s already plugged in, that isn’t the problem. Making a sound wouls be better, you could go get another battery in time.
it can happen to anyone. Especially if that person is doing more than they are use to, and are in a hurry, or being rushed by the field staff. Its funny what stress can do to you.
These guys went on to win state last year, so they aren’t a couple newbies, things can just go wrong.
Use a vex speaker, there are audio files for every number that it can play. In your code, have a number that you increment with every revision of the code, and make it so that when the robot powers on, it says that number
Make a checklist. It will eliminate mistakes like this. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just have plugging in and turning on things on it somewhere, plus make your last point 3 green lights on the controller &1 green light on the expander.
This is a great idea. Another great idea is to have a check that will check things like this and display error messages on the LCD screen. You could run this test before each match. It could even be used to check each motor and sensor.
