Jaguar Failure
 

Has any team experienced a Jaguar failure (other than losing magical smoke)? I had many hours with the benchtop system up-and-operating and then the LED suddenly failed (as well as the output voltage). It was powered in the proper way (12 v battery through the PDB).

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Just wondering how did it fail? Under heavy loads, or it just fried.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

No load other than a van door motor (itself not loaded). No magic smoke. Autopsy revealed no carbon.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Are the limit switch jumpers still installed?

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Jaguars, like Victors, are sensitive to metal bits inside; they are somewhat more difficult to clean out though.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Yes.......and no metal bits inside

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

We experienced a failure on two of our jags. Visit the link below. It is a large file.. about 20 meg so be patient. During the test both the victor and the jag are receiving the same signal. Power was applied to all three devices simultaneously. The two jags LEDs were both solid red and nonresponsive. The victor was still functional. The problem was repeatable by cycling power.

http://www.crosstheroadelectronics.c...uarFailure.avi

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

This is a bit worrying. Are they going to fix it or has someone informed FIRST of the problem?

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Just wondering if there has been any new information on this. Was a cause of the failure found? A solution? Anything?

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

I was hoping that the jaguars would not fail easily. Last year we had to replace quite a few blown victors.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

I am not certain of the cause. It appears to be a power-up issue. The Jags became nonresponsive (solid red LED as seen in the video) when power was cycled(applied then removed repeatedly). Here is my theory as to why. The Jag I believe uses an ARM processor. My experience with ARM chips is that they require more time to stabilize than most processors upon intial powerup. They have seperate voltages for the core and peripherals. The lock up could be caused from a timing issue between powering the core and peripherals. Again this is pure speculation. I am basing this on similar experiences with the Chicklet which also uses an ARM processor. Whatever the cause may be I hope FIRST addresses this issue prior to Kickoff.

They Jag seems like a very promising speed controller. It has great low-speed control and fast response. It supports CAN and can decode quadrature. All of this functionality is great but if the device locks up and causes a team to lose just one match, then as far as I am concerned the device is as good as garbage.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

So, are these Jags now fancy paper weights? When I hear the term "locked up" when it comes to electronics i make the assumption that you can power the item down and restart it and it will work normally.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Have these failures been reported to FIRST and Luminary Micro?? These units are so new, you won't find much help here. I suggest you go to the source.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

I have not taken any steps thus far to report the problem to FIRST. I would like to perform a few more tests. However a problem like this would most likely have occurred during Beta testing of the product. I will contact LM today and inform them of the issue. This will at least give them a heads up to perform some tests of their own. The reason it was posted on CD was to inform the teams and see if they have had similar experiences.

Re: Jaguar Failure
 

Luminary Micro is working with Mike to understand the issue he is seeing.

The initial speculation is that the inrush current due to the charging of the big bus capacitor in each Jaguar is causing the bench power supply to glitch causing a power on issue with the microcontroller. If this is indeed the case, it is very unlikely to affect battery operated systems.

More data will be generated when Mike has an opportunity to conduct further experiments in the team's shop. I'll respond back to the forum once I learn more.

By the way, I just updated the Jaguar microsite with the special Jaguar reorder link for FRC teams (through Digi-Key), a link to our technical support page, and a link to Luminary Micro's main webpage.

Regards,
Scott