My robot is cutting out from static it’s not disconnecting it has all green lights on cortex, battery expander, and both controllers were working (were running tandem controller). We have a holonomic drive train (HS motors) with shaft encoders on two of the 4 holonomic drive train motors. with six motors (all HT motors) on our gear tower lift mechanism with a potentiometer on the final shaft. Then we have a 2 claw motors (HT motor) with a potentiometer on one. Plus we have an LCD on our robot. Could somebody help us figure out why were cutting out but not actually disconnecting.
Do you mean cutting out as in overheating? If that’s the case then some pictures of your robot may help.
Here are pictures of our robot
Is it just certain motors that are overheating i.e. lift motors, drive motors? Right off the bat i can’t see any obvious spots with extra friction.
I would recommend spraying your field with Static Guard. You can find it at most stores with the dryer sheets. Helped us out a ton. Our one robot would reset if we bumped into the other because of static. There may be other problems if it does it all the time, but I still recommend the static guard.
Drive train would cut out. All four motors are internally geared at High speed. Axles are going directly into motors and assembly is done well…no obvious added friction. We’d like to stay high speed for obvious reasons.
Oops, sorry, i didn’t see that part about the static 
It does look like those gray wheels/claw motors on your base/claw may drag on the competition mat. If they do then you need to move them so that they don’t cause static buildup while driving.
Also, make sure the firmware on the controller and cortex is up to date and you can try pairing them.
Hope you figure out the problem 
It may not be a bad idea to move those gray wheels (they’re there to align our robot against the pole for Hanging). As for the firmware, the cortex, keys, and controller are new and the firmware was updated as of yesterday. Thanks for the suggestions though!
You don’t need to move them though unless they are dragging on the mat. Same thing with your claw motors.
The only time the grey wheels are touching the mat is when the robot tips when it is delivering stars and cubes and for the hang
And the robot isn’t moving at that point
Well then that’s not the problem. In that case your best bet would probably be static.
Why would you say it’s static? It’s much more likely you are just tripping PTCs.
Or just plain overheating issues may be more likely due to some faulty wiring.
EDIT: Just saw JPearman’s post
We are now having this same problem except our robot also disconnects with it. We have tried multiple different batteries and I don;t think it has anything to do with drawing too much power because even if we run just the drive base, it still disconnects. Sometimes, the robot even turns off completely. I don’t mean to take over this thread, just wanted to say that DaveP isn’t the only one experiencing this problem, so it may be static because static might be a more universal problem. I believe I have seen this in other posts on the forum, but I’m not sure.
That sounds like it’s an issue with the battery connection. Look at where the battery plugs in (rather it’s the cortex or a battery expansion piece) and see if one of those two little metal rings are bent out or not. If they are then you need to use a small piece of needlenose to crimp them back into a circle. Hope this helps
I’m on the same team as DaveP and i don’t think it could be faulty wiring just because we gone over our wiring time and time again and I doubt it could be that just for the sheer amount of time we have put in it.
Your drive train is being asked to do much work, and it is tripping the PTCs. Your symptoms are not typical of a static problem. Try changing the motor gears to the 100 rpm gears and see what happens. I believe that there is about a 98% chance of one of two things being your problem:
- You have too much friction in your drive.
- Your effective final drive ratio (internal gearing + external gearing + wheel size) is too aggressive, overheating your motors. Remember that holonomic drives generally place a higher load on the motors than a tank drive layout.