Signal light trouble-shooting

[customh]

We have wired the signal light as appropriately as possible, but there is not voltage going through the red wire to terminal 5 on the solid state relay.
If anyone could help that would be great!
:confused: :confused: :confused:
S.W.A.T. Team 2241
Coon Rapids High School

[robbrad]

First check your circuit. It the breaker closed? Is their a good fuse/breaker in the panel? If that checks out, use a multimeter to test for resistance between pins 5 and 1. This would tell you if the problem is internal. Mine has about 190k Ohms of resistance. Post your results.

[customh]

Well the issue isn't the breaker because we have the relay DIN-mounted and everything else running on PWM is getting power, and as far as we know (by the "Guidelines, Tips, and Good Practices" sheets) it is supposed to run off of a PWM. We have wired it per that and it does nothing.

[matthewsh]

Where do you have the PWM cable connected on your RC? It is supposed to connect to one of the team color connectors. I'm thinking that you might have connected it to the PWM connector on the RC. They updated the wiring diagram to show where it connects. You probably don't have the new version. Get it here...

http://www2.usfirst.org/2007comp/other/2007_ROBOT_SIGNAL_LIGHT_R1.pdf

Matthew

[customh]

Nope, we have it in one of the Team Color ports. Also I checked that schematic, and that is exactly what we were wiring it per earlier today. Its like our team color ports are hosed.

[matthewsh]

Has the light lit up at all? Did you try connecting the light directly to a battery to check that it works?

EDIT: Nevermind. I understand better now. It sounds like something is wrong on the RC end. I'm thinking...

[customh]

I was thinking RC too, but we have had no other issues. We should have tried the light on straight power though, it is a very likely component to fail compared to other things. Have to check that on Monday, meanwhile, any other ideas?

[matthewsh]

Tell me if you agree on the following:

The white wire is power (+)
The red wire is the trigger for the relay
The black wire is ground (-)

Thats what I think is going on. I'm not sure what the individual pins for team color on the RC are. IFI does not reveal that in any of their documents.

We do know, however, that last year (and I assume this year) the channel you were on determined the color the diagnostic light would be. Either red or blue. Red is default. To get blue you had to be on channel 13 or 31. Perhaps you accidentally changed the channel? Thats one thing to check, although I think that is unlikely because I vaguely remember that you had to do something weird in order to change the channel. Hope that helps. I will try do some testing Monday.

[customh]

Apparently we tried the light and that works, and we have it wired right, other ideas?

[matthewsh]

Did you check to see that you are on channel 40? If so, try loading to latest version of the default code. I don't think anything in the user changeable code can control how those team color ports behave, but it is worth trying. Also, try connecting one of the old team color lights (that change from red to blue) and see if it lights up. If it does not light up, contact IFI. Let us know how it goes.

[matthewsh]

Are you on a rookie team? If so you obviously will not have an old team color light.

Take some pictures of what you have wired (get different angles of it) and upload them here.

Also, have you successfully ran your robot any? Does the RC work as it should other than the signal light problem?

[Mike Hendricks]

We do know, however, that last year (and I assume this year) the channel you were on determined the color the diagnostic light would be. Either red or blue. Red is default. To get blue you had to be on channel 13 or 31. Perhaps you accidentally changed the channel? Thats one thing to check, although I think that is unlikely because I vaguely remember that you had to do something weird in order to change the channel. Hope that helps. I will try do some testing Monday.

MSB for the team number on the OI has to be changed to "1 / ON" indicating a high team number (off the top of my head, I don't know what it is, but I believe it is in the 3000's) Then you have to change the channel DIP switches on the OI into a specific sequence for the various channels. THEN you have to tether the RC to the OI and let it resync the team number. Finally, after all that you will be running on the secondary channels.

As for the red vs blue, I have a feeling that IFI changed the master code to reflect the new indicator. Keep in mind, at competition you have a 50% chance of getting on a blue channel.

As for getting your light to work, check that the relay is working correctly, and check your PWM cable (they DO fail). If you have a steady hand, you could use a voltmeter on the Team color pins and confirm that your RC is putting power to those ports.

If you know any teams around you, try contacting them and seeing if they have spare LED block from a previous year that you could borrow and confirm your RC is ok.

Having someone else double check your wiring and cable termination is also a good suggestion; not everything goes as planned when you're working late at night and mistakes do happen.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I am sure you have checked this but the Team LED jacks have five pins. Following the Tips and Guidelines be sure that "The PWM cable then plugs into one of the four Team Light 5–pin jacks on the RC with the Black wire on the Blk pin. Any excess PWM cabling needs to be secured into a harness and anchored to the chassis." The pins are extremely small and it's easy to be one pin off.
Another possibility is the solid state relay connections are touchy and it is easy to insert a wire so that the insulation is actually under the clamp when you tighten the hardware or the wire may have missed the connection altogether. Try removing the wires and reattaching both input and output. Without the LED attached you should be able to use a voltmeter to look at the output side of the relay and see +5 volts.

[Rich Kressly]

I am sure you have checked this but the Team LED jacks have five pins. Following the Tips and Guidelines be sure that "The PWM cable then plugs into one of the four Team Light 5–pin jacks on the RC with the Black wire on the Blk pin. Any excess PWM cabling needs to be secured into a harness and anchored to the chassis." The pins are extremely small and it's easy to be one pin off.
Another possibility is the solid state relay connections are touchy and it is easy to insert a wire so that the insulation is actually under the clamp when you tighten the hardware or the wire may have missed the connection altogether. Try removing the wires and reattaching both input and output. Without the LED attached you should be able to use a voltmeter to look at the output side of the relay and see +5 volts.

Al, my crew has tried all this and we still can't get the light to work. I'm not sure if we did the voltmeter check correctly, but we did get a value of +5 once. We also connected the light directly to the battery to make sure the light works and it does. Also, the little rectangular red light on the allen-bradey solid state relay has never gone on - is it supposed to? Also, given the schematic, position 2 (12) is currently unused. Is that correct?
I'm down to bad pwm or relay???? thoughts?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Rich,
We haven't installed out relay yet so I am guessing on this. The installation in the Tips and Guidelines isn't clear on this but you need to provide a jumper between pin 1 and 4 for the LED to get a return line. The LED on the relay should light when the relay is getting a command. The relay is sensitive to polarity but I am guessing you have followed the schematic to the letter on color code. You should be able to get the light on the relay to turn on and off without having the big LED even connected. According to the RC manual, the Team Color outputs are circuit breaker protected internal to the RC It is possible that you have a defective circuit breaker. I would try to connect to last year's RC and see if you can get it to work. Using a voltmeter measure between pins 1 and 5 on the relay socket and you should see 5 volts when powered on. If not check carefully the pins on the team color connectors on the RC. If you have 5 volts between red and black then you have a bad PWM cable. Let me know what you find.

[ntroup]

We haven't installed out relay yet so I am guessing on this.
Sorry, Al, we actually have tested out the Signal Light. On the first few attempts, using the original schematic from the Tips/Guidlines, we ran into problems with getting the lamp to light.

After scratching my head for a bit, I found the problem had to do with the labelling on the relay. I think I had accidentally looked at the small '14' to be Port 4 and had wired it incorrectly.

As Al said, if you guarantee that you have the 5V and GND sides correct, and they test out fine with a DVM, then it -should- be working fine. The relay LED definitely lit up when operating with/without the signal lamp attached.

I know that didn't help much, but it may be worth confirming that the wires are in the right ports on the relay. The labeling on the relay itself is a bit hard to read.

-Nate

[Rich Kressly]

Rich,
We haven't installed out relay yet so I am guessing on this. The installation in the Tips and Guidelines isn't clear on this but you need to provide a jumper between pin 1 and 4 for the LED to get a return line. The LED on the relay should light when the relay is getting a command. The relay is sensitive to polarity but I am guessing you have followed the schematic to the letter on color code. You should be able to get the light on the relay to turn on and off without having the big LED even connected. According to the RC manual, the Team Color outputs are circuit breaker protected internal to the RC It is possible that you have a defective circuit breaker. I would try to connect to last year's RC and see if you can get it to work. Using a voltmeter measure between pins 1 and 5 on the relay socket and you should see 5 volts when powered on. If not check carefully the pins on the team color connectors on the RC. If you have 5 volts between red and black then you have a bad PWM cable. Let me know what you find.

Al,
We tried a new pwm - no go. We also tried it on the old robot (forgot to mention that), still no go... we hooked it all back up with new pwm and ran the voltage test and got nowhere near the 5v expected. At this point I'm going to borrow a relay from a nearby team to see if that's the issue. I'll post this evening and let you know.
THANKS.

-Rich

[customh]

Well, we got it to work using a PWM straight to the light with the correct things jumped on the light itself. We basically did everything the schematics in "Guidelines..." said to with the exception of using the relay.

[Rich Kressly]

Here's another little interesting twist that may matter ... Al, I'll need you on this one.

The kit of parts checklist lists 700-SKOC2Z25 as the relay part number.
The relay I'm holding has a part number of 700-SKOZ2Z25.

In checking the Rockwell website, both parts are listed (and seem to have the same specs) here:
http://www.ra.rockwell.com/en/epub/catalogs/12768/229240/229266/229641/229677/print.html

Should/does this matter?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Rich,
The relay you have in your hand is a device intended for switching AC loads of 100-240 Volts. In addition it has zero cross detection so it is unlikely you can turn it on until you have both the control voltage and a sine wave AC load voltage that passes through zero volts. (this is a technique used to eliminate noise output when the relay closes at the high voltage point on the sine wave.) I am guessing that is why you can't turn it on with the device wired properly. The correct relay should help the problem.
Al

[Rich Kressly]

Thanks Al & Nate...
I sent the info to the official Q&A so they were aware and to see if they'd replace it. I'll keep everyone posted, but until then look to see if the part number is correct ... that "Z" instead of the "C" certainly makes a difference

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Sorry we couldn't get you an answer until late on a Friday. Maybe next time. Good Luck!

[Dave K.]

Al, my crew has tried all this and we still can't get the light to work. I'm not sure if we did the voltmeter check correctly, but we did get a value of +5 once. We also connected the light directly to the battery to make sure the light works and it does. Also, the little rectangular red light on the allen-bradey solid state relay has never gone on - is it supposed to? Also, given the schematic, position 2 (12) is currently unused. Is that correct?
I'm down to bad pwm or relay???? thoughts?

Something else that you may have already considered, but do you know for a fact that each of the wires in the cable you used is good end to end? So far I have found two bad 3-pin cables out of those supplied in the kit this year.

With your cabling connected, and the power turned off, you could use a DVM to confirm that the wiring out of the RC is actually making it to your light & solid state relay. The wiring to the 5 pin headers on the RC are all identical, so with the wiring connected, you can probe the pin on the immediately adjacent header and it will mirror that of the one you are connected to.

If you are satisfied that the wiring is correct, you can use a DVM (or better yet an oscilloscope) to see if you can see the pulses, representing the light blinking, are actually coming out of the RC. If I remember correctly, the pulses are on the order of 100ms in length, so your DVM should show some non-zero voltage as a result of that, and if it responds quickly enough, may even be able to show you the pulsing. If you had an older, analog meter movement, multi-meter, the pulsing would be even easier to see.

[Mike Smith]

We just discovered that we have the A.C. relay instead of the D.C. relay. Any thoughts on how to obtain the correct relay? We are going to try to get one from Allen-Bradley, however time is very short!

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike Betts]

...Any thoughts on how to obtain the correct relay?...

Mike,

I would start by contacting FIRST.

Mike

[Aidan F. Browne]

We just discovered that we have the A.C. relay instead of the D.C. relay. Any thoughts on how to obtain the correct relay? We are going to try to get one from Allen-Bradley, however time is very short!

Mike - Team Update #9 tells you how to let them know you have one:




There is a team that received relay part number 700-SKOZ2Z25 instead of the correct part number 700-SKOC2Z25. We expect that this was annomaly, but if you notice that you also received the 700-SKOZ2Z25, please email FRCParts@usfirst.org. Please note that the 700-SKOZ2Z25 part will not allow the signal light to function.

[Manoel]

We also received the relay with the wrong part number, and have already contacted FIRST. Since teams will likely not be mounting the lights to the robot 'till the last minute, I STRONGLY suggest everyone to take a look at the relay and check which one they got when we still have the time.
I'll be contacting the other Brazilian teams to do so ASAP, I assure you.

Regards,

[Mike Smith]

Thanks for the information Aidan. My students just gave me this update!

Good luck in the competitions.

Mike

[Rich Kressly]

Aiden already posted the update 9 info. To follow up, after I sent an email about the wrong relay, FIRST responded within hours and is mailing the team the correct part.

[Rich Kressly]

Aiden already posted the update 9 info. To follow up, after I sent an email about the wrong relay, FIRST responded within hours and is mailing the team the correct part.

We received the correct part from FIRST today. The light fired right up - problem solved. Please check this part number if you haven't already wired your signal light.

[caraddicted101]

Hey guys,

Team 668 has done all that and the light will not turn on. HOWEVER, I put the volt meter to pos. and neg. terminals on another light port on the RC when the robot was on and I tripped the light thus making it turn on. So, with this and in talking to our programmers i think that the lights will work just fine come competition. (They might need the competition controller to be plugged in to work)

Ryan Epperson

[MasterChief1732]

We just got our new relay today. So I put it on and nothing happened. There is a red light on the relay that lights up though. Is there a certain team color pin for the pwm cable to be connected too?

Thanks

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Master,
If the light on the relay is lighting then it is being fed correctly. The wiring error lies between the relay and the lamp. Be sure to install all the jumpers shown in the diagram particularly the one across the relay which supplies the return for the lamp.

[Team 1967]

We are having the same issue with our signal light, however, when in the voltage setting on our volt meter, we get an output of 12 for all of the connections on the signal light. Has anyone occured this problem before?