Loco decks on Roadrunners stop in test lab

[krichardsson]

I have observed that the integrated loco decks on the Roadrunners in our test lab stop running sometimes. The behavior is similar to the problem we had 2 years ago (#436 and #368).

My feeling is that it started a couple of months ago, but that it has become worse over time. In the beginning I could see one or two that were not blinking, now it can be 9 out of 10 after 1 day.

[krichardsson]

I have done some more investigations and it seems to be related to reception. I put all the roadrunners in TDoA2 or 3 mode (to make sure they are only receiving) and they survived without problems for 2 days. As soon as I turned on the anchors in the flight lab I could observe that the Loco decks stopped working one by one. It probably took about 30 minutes until the first deck stopped and after a few hours 5 had stopped.

The Crazyflie is still happy and everything looks fine, except that the LEDs on the Loco deck stops blinink.

The Loco driver is event driven, where each event triggers the next read or write, which in turn generates a new event and so on. My guess is that the event loops is terminated because some event is not handled properly, or because the underlying library is not generating an event under some conditions.

Our flight lab is some distance away from the test lab, and I have the feeling that we get this problem when reception is poor. I can not remember seeing this in the flight lab where reception is good.

It seems to be an old problem, tested on versions:

• latest daily build
• 2022.12
• 2022.09
• 2022.01