Quote:
Originally Posted by pyr0b0y
Our team had the same problem with the metal shavings, it would shut down our cRIO everytime. No one ever thought that it would have anything to do with the metal shavings. As soon as we took care of the shavings, we did not have anymore problems....the smallest things sometimes cause the biggest problems
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Here's a little bit of insight into how metal shavings can affect the cRIO. Metal debris inside of the chassis can, at any time, cause shorts internally. You may be really lucky and short out two nets with no problem. Or, slightly less likely and short out signals that will cause errors (e.g. a data line is shorted to GND). Or, very unlucky, and the short can cause permanent damage.
In the event something unexpected occurs, and a bad instruction is executed, or a data is corrupted, the cRIO will most likely reboot (processor exception). If a power rail shorts out, depending on the location the cRIO will shut down (over-current protection), or the internal safety fuse will blow.
One nasty problem with debris is that you may not have a problem until you hit something, which could be in the middle of a match! Bad news there...
So keeping the cRIO (or any of the electronics for that matter) clean is critical, and so we're looking into documenting a procedure teams can use to maintain their hardware.