Electrical equipment
 

Hii guys :)
First of all I hope you all having a great building season.
I want to ask you : how to check that the electrical equipments are allright with no damage? such as : Jaguars, Power Distrubtion Poard, cRio ?
I hope you will reply me because I'm in the workshop right now :)
Thanks, and good luck in the competition::safety::

Re: Electrical equipment
 

Multimeter or just hook up motors to them and run code

Re: Electrical equipment
 

I want another method expect of to check it in the robot and connect every PD/jaguar/sidecar to it's cabels and PWM....
Because as known , every team has more than 1 PD/cRio/sidecar/jaguar to check !!
thanks,
Gadeer-1946

Re: Electrical equipment
 

One good way to do it that doesn't require additional hardware or more complex setup is to build a control board for testing, on a piece of plywood or some such. Build it so that you can easily hook up and disconnect any components you want to test, and write some basic code to spin up motors or what have you. This does require an additional cRIO, Digital Sidecar, etc., so if your team does not have those to spare, the multimeter is probably the best option.

Re: Electrical equipment
 

I want easier option

Re: Electrical equipment
 

The fuse panel, side car, analog breakout and solenoid breakout have diagnostic LEDs as do the motor controllers and Spikes. Much can be done with just the LEDs, check the manuals. If the LEDs look correct then use a multimeter to verify the correct voltages (where you would hook up a motor, solenoid etc).

HTH

Re: Electrical equipment
 

These are complex devices and so they defy a simple fault detection method in most cases. FWIW, the cRIO and NI labview were initially developed to coordinate test equipment and make it possible to find out if your just-produced electronic gizmo was done right.

Re: Electrical equipment
 

Gadeer,
I use my nose, almost all failed devices emit a serious odor when they have failed. Then I use my eyes. When a Victor has failed due to abuse or reverse polarity, it usually blows the case apart on one or more of the FETs. The PD rarely has an issue but if you just connect the battery and nothing else, three LEDs ought to light up and the end of the board. If you have motor controllers connected to the outputs with no breakers installed, you will see Red LEDs below the WAGO connectors light for each circuit, indicating the breaker is open. The DSC has three LEDs that light when the power is applied. If you do not get all three, there is usually a problem with the power input. A DSC power LED will light when connected to a working cRio but not all three.
There is no hard and fast rule for measuring with a meter any of the components. In certain failures, using an ohmmeter will show a short when checking the PWM inputs but this is a very rare occurrence.