Hello all,
So I apoligize in advance for adding yet another disconnection thread to the forums. However, our issues are a bit different and I’m beginning to stress out a little bit. I’ve tried every single thing I can to fix our issues and at our last competition, it didn’t work.
So for a little background, we have been having disconnect issues all year. However, after the last post I made about disconnecting, it seemed to be fixed. We took the advice of those who posted and changed keys, taped and rubber banded both keys, taped battery connections, and tried anything else we could think of and it seemed to fix it. However, at our last tournament, disconnects absolutely killed us. I ran a ton of tests the night before and was working on our autonomous so I was plugging and unplugging my cortex key a lot. However, I drove it for a considerable time after with no issues.
The morning of during inspection, our firmware was out of date so the inspectors updated to 4.1 as is required. However, upon going back to the pits, our controls were a little messed up. The joysticks would be half our lift and half our drive and the buttons for our intakes did our pneumatics. Everything seemed to be switched. It did the same thing to all five of our teams.
I re downloaded the old firmware to my CPU and controller but had serious issues with it. The computer wouldn’t recognize the CPU being connected for a while then when it finally did, it wouldn’t let me download my old program on. I tried a ton of different things and finally just rebooted the computer. It worked and all our controls worked well again. However, we started to have disconnect issues right after.
We would have a green light on the controller to start the match for all but the robot light which was red. We would start the match and in two matches, our autonomous would go forward and knock the big ball off but on the return trip to our starting tile, it would stop working. It would sit until the end of autonomous. I would turn my controller on and off and regain the green on my controller. Then we would start the match and within five seconds, we would lose connection again. However, this type of disconnect is different than any other one we’ve encountered before.
With our old disconnects, we could turn our controller off and on and simply cycle it to regain control. However, with this one, the actual VEXNet light on the cortex would be a slow red flash. No other lights would be on. From experience, we know there isn’t anything we can do with that. We just had to sit for a whole match and watch as a robot knocked a big ball off the rail to win the match. All the other robots were just sitting. Team 21 ended up showing that the tower we had been connected to for that match was faulty and messed with a lot of people who were connected to it. However, they could pull the cable out of their controller and continue driving once that happened. With ours, our cortex was just shut off. It wouldn’t matter if we pulled out our cable.
For even more information, we use EasyC V4, we have no IMEs, and just two potentiometers to tell which programs we will run. We don’t use an LCD screen, have a power splitter, and are driving with four omni wheel drive that has all motors internally geared for speed and have a 1:1 external ratio.
At is point, I’m a bit at a loss. I don’t know how to fix our issues anymore so any help would be greatly appreciated.