Our new robot has decided it doesn’t want to work… There are many problems, which we have worked tirelessly and fruitlessly to find the causes of.
The first and foremost issue, our intake motors work fine in one direction, but if they try to move in the other direction, the move jerkily and weakly, stopping and starting sporadically. We tried rewriting our code, wiring the motors into different ports, using known working motors, and redownloading our cortex’s firmware, but the problem persisted. Then, we turned the wires around to that black went to red and red went to black, and the problem continued in the opposite of the direction it had been in before. We are utterly stumped.
We have problems with other parts of the robot. The arm motors, with no sacks loaded on the intake, stop and start every half second while moving up or down. We built this arm to have minimal friction, and we are using 393s that we know work. The arm is 15" long, the intake is light, and we’re using a 7:1 gear reduction.
We also have a wheel on our mecanum drive that refuses to move while we’re strafing right. It works fine moving forward, backward, and left strafing, but not strafing right.
Our cortex also has trouble connecting to VEXnet. Sometimes, all of the cortex lights are solid red, and sometimes the VEXnet light turns green and the other lights turn off. In both of these situations, the robot does not respond to the controllers.
We checked our wiring and it all seems to be in order. We have a brand new cortex, and we’re really hoping that it is not defective. We’re going to test with one of our other teams’ cortexes to see. Do you guys have any other theories?