[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

Having the most failure prone component (digital sidecar) now built into the robot controller worries me. How often have shorted pins, miswired power leads, and other mistakes caused burned-out sidecars?

I sincerely hope the controller is over-engineered to a level that makes it virtually indestructable. Otherwise teams will be replacing their entire controller when someone shorts a 24V power to a 5V jumper.

Was this an issue teams ran into with the pre-2009 IFI controller (which was also fully integrated)? You're absolutely correct that the I/O circuit design needs to have shorting, overvoltage, and inversion protections built in to avoid failures in our swarf-heavy and miswire-prone robots. The digital sidecar has indeed been problematic for a lot of teams (mine included) but I've not heard of a team damaging one of the cRio modules--we had an analog bumper get pretty hot and give incorrect results this year when we shorted the 5V and GND, but after getting rid of the short it worked again. I'm pretty confident that NI knows about these concerns and is capable of designing in appropriate protections for the Athena I/O.