[marccenter]

Dear Rustree,

Let me go one step deeper.. may or may not be related. During our Michigan District Competition event at Waterford we lost connectivity to 3 CIM's on our drivetrain. I troubleshooted it to a bad digital sidecar (at least I thought). In teleop I could see the joystick commands via the dashboard but no response. I connected each CIM from PWM4, PMW5 and PMW6 and they all worked using the sidecar PWM3 output but not their respective sidecar outputs. Note that the software code was quite stable. Assuming a bad digital sidecar, I checked one out from spare parts. Upon replacement I had the same behavior.

Having little hair to spare, and 30 years of embedded microprocessor experience, I was at a loss...so I redeployed the cRIO with my code and the problems went away. I replaced the spare parts digital sidecar with my original and everything was fine again (PWM3, PMW4, PMW5, PMW6 operation). We had no further problems for the remaining 8 or 9 matches.

Moral of the story...sometimes redeploying your known good code into a cRIO with very unusual problems may solve your dilemma. Sometimes! This advice and 50 cents get's you a coffee on the 4th floor Pontiac, MI coffee station.