We are in the fourth year of our robotics program. Some of our Cortex micro-controllers are four years old and some are younger. Multiple students use the same robots daily.
Each day, without fail, we have to do a firmware download in order to get the robot to run the student’s code. Does anybody have a good explanation why this is the case? We are not running complex programs right now. It is frustrating, but manageable. Thanks.
To answer your question: No, you shouldn’t have to frequently refresh the firmware.
While the firmware utility is a good tool to reset a Cortex that isn’t behaving properly, you may want to delve further into your code and the programming software.
Test the Cortex with a sample template and make sure you have the proper #pragma statements at the top. This should help you determine if there is an issue with your code.
Try using a different IDE (RobotC or PROS) to program your robot and make sure you’re at the latest software release.
this could be completely irrelevant since I came into vex in the last year of cortex only, but could the issue be in the fact that the micro controllers themselves might be getting too old and doing these firmware updates is the only thing that resets them.