[Levansic]

OK, I got a picture of our remaining black jaguar, which I did not repair. This unfortunate unit was damaged in a finals match, in an earlier year. The RJ-11 port on this unit was not as bad as the other black jaguars that I had to repair.

If you look carefully at the two ports, you can see that the wires in the RJ-12 (6p6c) port on the left are pretty uniform, and are sprung down about half-way through their wire guides on the bottom. This is a "good" port.

Now, compare that to the wires in the RJ-11 (6p4c) port on the right. Those wires are not uniform, and the last three, especially the fourth one, are close to the back wall of the port. The first wire is sprung almost the same amount as the wires on the RJ-12 port.

On most of our black jaguars, the distance of these wires from the back wall alternated. For example wire 2 and 4 would be almost flat, while 1 and 3 would be sprung out more. I used a pair of needle tweezers to pull these wires out. They often would jump tracks to a neighboring wire guide. I would then move them back to the correct track, and test the port by inserting a plug.

This weekend, we reassembled the base of our robot from last year, but wired it with CAN. After tweaking the ports on our black jags, I was unable to get any comm errors, no matter how much we wiggled each and every cable.

We are so ready to swear off PWM cables forever!
-- Len