[NotInControl]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

This concerns me from the perspective of I've always viewed the DSC as a disposable pile of crap that I expect to short out and die if I look at it funny (having said that, I fully expect the bagged DSC to hear me and commit ritual suicide just to prove me right). Have the DSCs become less unstable or can I assume I'll have to start keeping spare roboRIOs around?

Lol. Well I personally haven't had a lot of trouble with DSC when wired properly. Most of the problems we have had early on were from our own misuse. But in recent years we have been pretty good at keeping the DSC running happy.

Any idea on what/how your current DSC is failing?

The RoboRio has a 34-pin Expansion custom electronics port that allows access to shared pins on the controller. Depending how the hardware failed you may be able to recover using this port, instead of swapping out a whole new controller.

I would look at it this way. In the current system if you have a DSC problem, it could be power to the DSC, the CRIO, the Module Cards, the cable from the card to the DSC, or problems on the DSC itself, or the thing plugged into it. Lets assume code and mechanical is correct.

Any of of these issues makes troubleshooting a longer/harder task. The new RoboRio, it is either a controller problem, or not. You don't need to worry about cards, power not getting to the DSC, or the cable from the module to the DSC being frayed, not seated correctly, etc. It should be easier for a lot of teams, and when you think of it from that perspective and FIRST trying to reduce the entrance learning curve for new teams, this was a smart move.

While I can not speak on the specifics of how the new controller is designed, whether or not you need to swap out a RoboRio because the rails failed depends on how they failed. If you broke pins off the board, you could move to another pin, if you fried a register that controls data on the bus, and that register is also used for the expansion slot, and all other pins are used, then you may need to swap out a Rio.

Although I am not sure how one could do that, I am sure in FRC everything is possible. And planning for the worst is always advisable. At every competition, we have a spare 4-slot cRIO ready to drop in to our bot at a moments notice, incase we happen to fry it. And I would advise my team to do the same next year with the RoboRio. Fortunately, we havent had that happen yet. <<Keeps Knocking on Wood>>

Hope this helps,
Kevin