VexNet and Wheel Peoblem

VEX V5 General Discussion Technical Discussion
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Our team is having problems with the brain and controller staying connected while moving and the wheels stoping randomly. When we were scrimmaging another team half way through the match the controller disconnected and on the controller the joystick light was orange and the VexNet light was slowly blinking red. We Reset the controller and it reconnected, but it kept disconnecting. We replaced the keys and also reconnect them with the orange cord, and tried it with/without the competition switch. This helped a little but it’s still disconnecting. At the same time our wheels would randomly stop working. The wheels are on a 1:1 chain and sprocket drivetrain, and each side has two motors. When the robot and controller is directly connected the wheels work perfectly.

Robot specs:
Newest version on EasyC
2 - VexNet 2.0 Keys
4 - high strength lift motors
4 - high strength drive motors
2 - high strength intake motors
2 - batteries

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Did you have your 9-volt backup battery connected?

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Yes we tried it with/without a backup battery.

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Can we get a picture of your bot? If you’re “losing motors”, it could be that you have too much weight on them and they’re stalling, even if they are geared internally for torque. Also, for the keys, I had a similar problem when building my first robot. What I ended up doing to fix it was rubber bands on the end of the key pushing it into the cortex, and that helped me a lot. However, another possible problem that I’ve had much more frequently is the battery rapidly disconnecting/reconnecting at times, effectively resetting the cortex and forcing one to wait on it to restart and reconnect. A video of the problem occurring and pictures would be extremely useful.

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