Hello, I’m Brad from Team Hardrada. I’ve been lurking for a short while now and I’ve finally taken the plunge in actually joining! I’m looking forward to getting into this community!

I come with a strange problem. When attending Extreme Robots in Manchester, we discovered a problem with getting our featherweight Harald to react to control inputs. I'll try and be as detailed as possible. When our robot was fully built, with the lid on the distance it would travel before losing signal would be around 20m. When we got to the event, behind the stage it would work almost fine with very occasional cutouts. None that you would notice until you're looking for them. When we got to the featherweight rumble there was no movement to any input on the controller throughout the whole fight. Even in the loading area, there was no movement no matter how close you got to the robot. After the stationary fight we did some more tests. If there was any obstruction between the controller and receiver, the signal would be stopped.

After switching to a very kindly lent controller and receiver, it worked perfectly with plenty of range and no disruptions. Now this naturally seems to me to be a controller/receiver issue however after doing some further tests, the receiver when out of the robot and with no other signals around worked well with no disruptions and plenty of range. When the whole thing was placed back in the robot however, the range decreased significantly.
This has confused us a bit.

If anyone has any ideas of what to try or what the problem may have been at the event I would love to know. Of course, the last thing we want is to go to our next event in June and find the same problem! The controller is an Etronix ET1127 Pulse and we’re using the receiver that came with it. If you need to know anything else, just let me know!