[EricVanWyk]

Please don't do it again, it wasn't designed for this sort of situation! :-)

The short, conservative, answer is that this fault condition is not within spec, and further operation is not guaranteed. The GPIO signals are not intended for 12V operation in any configuration, the GPIO power and ground pins are intended as outputs only. Unfortunately, that isn't made clear in the documentation you linked to. I will try to include this information in the next revision.

The issue is that the GPIO pull-up resistors and ESD protection diodes provide paths for this extra voltage sneak across the rest of the board, so it could have damaged any system within the DSC. It is very likely that the board needs to be replaced, most of the circuitry is now suspect especially since an unrelated section is faulting.


The longer answer is that "a few seconds of forward motion from multiple motors" has to be the weirdest symptom I've ever heard for a DSC fault. My best guess is that it is somehow generating a single PWM pulse. Here are the problems with that theory:
1) It should generate less than a second of torque before the motor controllers shut down again. Maybe inertia makes it look like several seconds?
2) The pulse length window is pretty short. It feels unlikely that a fault could accidentally create a valid signal.

Are you using Victors or Jaguars?

Do you have control of the motors after their initial jump?

Have you tried swapping in a different DSC?


The NI9403's datasheet states that it can withstand up to +/-30V (with no impedance) on up to 8 channels. You likely applied +/-12V with 0-20 kOhms impedance to many of its channels. I can't guarantee that you did not damage this unit, but I suspect the DSC much more than the 9403.