Losing Jaguars? What are the common reasons why it burns out?

[Team 2524]

Since we started programming like a week ago, we lost one jaguar. My teacher was driving and then the robot's right motor kept on going. The jaguar was still supplying an electric current but, no LED light.

What are some common reasons or experience in which your jaguar burned out?

*(comments/experience on victor burnouts?)

[pfreivald]

We've had several Jaguars burn out for no apparent reason -- no shorts, no fried FETs, no nothing, they just quit (or in two cases refused to supply more than about 4.5 volts). We've had two (including a black Jag this year) die right out of the box the moment they were powered.

The only time we've ever had a Victor 884 fail was when a mentor who didn't know what he was doing shorted across the FETs with a multimeter. (He blew the fuse in the multimeter as well!)

[AllenGregoryIV]

We have lost 3 this year, all black. We think one was to an aluminum shaving inside the case but we haven't opened it to look. The other two just stopped working during driver practice, they didn't over heat of anything. Hopefully we don't have this problem at regionals.

[Chickenonastick]

As the previous poster mentioned, Jaguars are apparently quite sensitive to metal bits and pieces. Our team covers the electrical board with a cloth sheet before drilling/working on the chassis.

[Taylor]

... My teacher was driving and then ...

Well there's your problem!

[dbeckwith]

Our team covers the electrical board with a cloth sheet before drilling/working on the chassis.

We do the same.
Luckily, we've only lost one tan Jaguar this year, we think to a metal shaving, but we'll bring plenty of backups to the competition. Victors do seem more reliable certainly, but the Jaguars are more fancy and have more features. Ability for durability is the tradeoff I guess.

[Dad1279]

Metal bits & static.

[BrandonG]

I was just addressing ours and when I was done one died... no movement, not connected, it just decided it was done I guess.... o.o

[sithmonkey13]

1178 lost three this year: One tan one from someone wiring the battery in wrong, one tan one that mysteriously stopped working, and a black that due to a factory defect, actually caught on fire during a test (Video Below).

http://www.youtube.com/user/durt1178#p/a/u/1/0BK6MG6mslo

[Kingofl337]

You shouldn't see black jags fail unless abused. The grey jags usually die because of ESD.

[bobosalad]

we lost 4 black jags and we covered while working on the robot. it was just plain bad... we saw a few fires and we saw a few no responses. good luck guys.

[TerryS]

We had one go out that was connected to a motor with a loose connector. Our EE surmised that the Jaguar did not like it's load cutting in and out due to the loose connection. We secured the motor connector and the replacement Jaguar held up for the rest of our pre-ship practices. We're careful about covering our electronics up if any metal cutting is going on.

[kws4000]

Last year, we were grinding down long bolts because of excess weight, and low and behold, a little turbine oil for the air cutter somehow worked its way into the Jag and we lost a little bit of that magic white smoke :mad: .

We've also found out that at least two of the Jags one of the little thingamajiggers on the board was broken/popped/black/missing.

Since then the majority of what we have been using is only Vics, not likely we'll be going back to Jags anytime soon.

The window motors don't like jags either, period.

[notmattlythgoe]

You shouldn't see black jags fail unless abused. The grey jags usually die because of ESD.

I wish this were true. 4 of the 6 Black Jaguars we ordered this year failed on us at some point. 2 of the 6 had broken LED's straight out of the box. The quality control on them seems to have gone down hill.

[martin417]

The only jag we lost (permanently) was when it was wired incorrectly (input power reversed). We currently have about 18 jags. We are using 8 jags to control our bot, and are running CAN bus (same as last year). We did have several stop responding while being addressed for CAN, but we were able to recover them using the recovery utility.

My recommendation: When addressing jags, do not try to address a whole string at once. For gray jags, use a black jag as the converter and only connect one gray jag at a time. For black jags, connect directly to one and only one black jag.

[Nelson]

Ironicaly, we broke just about every peice of equipment last year, including a battery, and although we had a jaguar that we though was broken, it ended up being the transmissin, so it appears our team has luck with jaguars, if not with everything else.

[yara92]

My Quation ToTexas Instrument!
Who we can know if the Jaguar is working or Not?
Is there any way to do that without any Guess?

[nighterfighter]

We did have several stop responding while being addressed for CAN, but we were able to recover them using the recovery utility.

My recommendation: When addressing jags, do not try to address a whole string at once. For gray jags, use a black jag as the converter and only connect one gray jag at a time. For black jags, connect directly to one and only one black jag.

Yeah... sorry about that.

I was updating the firmware on all of them, and they were all daisy chained together. Never had a problem with it before...

Spent a good hour and a half trying to figure out the problem too. :/

[bensherman]

We lost a total of 4 black jags this season. It seems that the beige jags are much more reliable. They're all connected via PWM's not CAN, so the CAN issue above can be ruled out. We lost two during competition for seemingly no reason, they just stopped. We're going to get the 2011 jag's replaced and swap our flight bot out with the older model jags as they haven't given us issues.

[J.Warsoff]

As said by ben, we have lost a lot of black jags. i took one or two them apart to try and figure out why the kept burning out. It looked like the electronic valves (i think that's what they're called. its the 8 boxes around the central capacitor) actually melted the plastic encasing holding the in place. One of the mentors on the team told me that that usually happens when the source, gate, and drain components inside the valves get knocked out of place, which messes up the flow of electricity

[techhelpbb]

We've lost 1 black Jaguar so far.

The reason for the failure isn't clear...but there were enough possible causes that it may not have mattered.

It refused to power on shortly after it rained and water got near it (but not inside it).

It refused to power on shortly after the robot it was on was hauled by truck to a practice area. So if there was some junk inside it...it had all the opportunity it needed to cause trouble.

We got no life...at all...from it once it failed and it failed from the instant of power on (so it basically just never turned on again).

A close inspection inside the unit did not demonstrate the cause.

We simply replaced it and we were fine.

[connor.worley]

We use the tan Jags on "J-Bot", the square defense bot we practice with. We were using the 2009 wheels and traction was pretty terrible on carpet. Eventually so much static built up that when the left side of the robot hit a metal pole it discharged and the left Jag died.

[slijin]

We've had very bad experiences with Jaguars, to the point that we absolutely refuse to use them. The fact that we had switched to mecanum drive this build season, and that the new black Jaguars had been released encouraged us to try our hands at CAN once more (our first experiment with it had been in '09, with 2CAN, but the Jaguar we played with failed straight out of the KoP, and was enough to warn us away from them).

We ended up spending the first 4 weeks of build season incessantly debugging persistent, temperamental CAN issues. An order of 15 blacks came in during week 2, only for us to begin CAN configuration and discover that 3 were dead out of the box. Another four failed upon connecting them to a drivetrain. Subsequent horrors include intermittent communication, a Jaguar that would work when it was the only one in the CAN and became a coupler when placed in a CAN with more than one Jaguar, Jaguars that continuously encountered voltage faults (despite no gearbox jamming or whatnot), and one with exploding blue sparks. After that, we just refused to continue with Jaguars.

Jaguars on PWM on the other hand, seem to be effective motor controllers (our clone robot this year - since it was our first try at mecanum - has Jaguars on the drivetrain, and they behave just fine).

We always cover up the electronics board when drilling, and vacuum for shavings after doing so (while grounding the robot chassis).

[Ninja_Bait]

However, Sam, I wouldn't discredit metal shavings and static. Mounting to an exposed metal plate, over which we basically machined our robot, probably caused a lot of problems. I love blaming programmers, too - have we tried to look at other teams' codes? There are teams that do jags without a hitch. We're doing something wrong.

[Garret]

At LA we lost 2 or 3 Jags. I don't remember the colors I know that at least 1 was black.

Later, we took them apart and found metal shavings inside the cases. They were probably the cause of the failure.

[Blackphantom91]

Metal shavings can kill a jaguar fast!, Ways to prevent it are clean up after cutting and shield the motors while doing work on another part. But sometimes they just combust and one of the terminals can be faulty.( That's what happened to one of our brown jags.) Just have to take precautions with them due to the failure rate.

[yara92]

Metal shavings can kill a jaguar fast!, Ways to prevent it are clean up after cutting and shield the motors while doing work on another part. But sometimes they just combust and one of the terminals can be faulty.( That's what happened to one of our brown jags.) Just have to take precautions with them due to the failure rate.

we lost 2 or 3 Jags. The reason we figure that we are not be carefully when our guys working drilling metal shavings See picture.
I open all the Jaguars clean them by ear. They worked fine
Mentor team 1946
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