Any chance your drive motors were stalling when your bot hit the peg? Could stalled motors cause an excessive amount of current to be drawn from your batteries, and cause the Cortex to reset, thus restarting your autonomous?
If so , would a 9 volt battery have prevented the Cortex from resetting?
One thing I haven’t seen yet, are you using IME’s? Those have a chance of sending back static electricity and causing that issue. Both of our high school robots suffered from the same issue until we unplugged the IME’s.
you say you don’t use the 9 volt backup battery. That’s against the rules. <R13> states
It runs into the peg for like 2 seconds so it shouldn’t be stalling and we are not using IMEs, only rangefinders, gyro, quads, and a limit switch.
I mean we have been testing the autonomous for about 2 months including the same running into the peg, and it just now started restarting itself.
Sigh…
I was wondering, my programmer said it wouldn’t matter but we we haven’t tested the autonomous with vexnets all week, only usb. It made me wonder if it was only restarting because it wasn’t wireless.
A few thoughts.
I vote for the battery connector being the most likely culprit. Second choice would be USB connector on the VEXnet key.
The 9v backup battery is only enabled when a competition switch or field control is connected. Sometimes students think it doesn’t help but they are practicing without a competition switch so it makes no difference. The 9v battery needs to be in good condition, when needed quite a lot of power is used to keep the cortex and VEXnet alive (although much less now with the white keys).
Static can cause the behavior you are describing, robot touches the field perimeter and discharges, cortex crashes and the ROBOTC watchdog timer resets after about 1 second. You would know if static is a problem, you would also occasionally experience the same static discharge when you touched the robot.
The key to figuring all this out is to look at the leds on the cortex and joystick, if you can describe accurately what you see we may be able to figure it out.
On friday I put in the battery, and connect both devices and pulled, wiggled and pushed on the battery connector and nothing happened at all, no problems.
Here is a link to a video of our cortex set up if that may help distinguish something. http://youtu.be/gSCl3m1j07Y
Since our competition was canceled today, I will try to video the cortex while doing autonomous to show what happens right when we hit the wall if that may help.
Our field does produce a lot of static when we sit on it I’ve noticed.
Your video says it’s private.
Using a humidifier in the room with your field might help reduce static. I’ve also seen teachers spray the field with Static Guard fabric spray or something else like it.
It should work now.
Yeah I might try static guard.