Losing Jaguars? What are the common reasons why it burns out?

[slijin]

We've had very bad experiences with Jaguars, to the point that we absolutely refuse to use them. The fact that we had switched to mecanum drive this build season, and that the new black Jaguars had been released encouraged us to try our hands at CAN once more (our first experiment with it had been in '09, with 2CAN, but the Jaguar we played with failed straight out of the KoP, and was enough to warn us away from them).

We ended up spending the first 4 weeks of build season incessantly debugging persistent, temperamental CAN issues. An order of 15 blacks came in during week 2, only for us to begin CAN configuration and discover that 3 were dead out of the box. Another four failed upon connecting them to a drivetrain. Subsequent horrors include intermittent communication, a Jaguar that would work when it was the only one in the CAN and became a coupler when placed in a CAN with more than one Jaguar, Jaguars that continuously encountered voltage faults (despite no gearbox jamming or whatnot), and one with exploding blue sparks. After that, we just refused to continue with Jaguars.

Jaguars on PWM on the other hand, seem to be effective motor controllers (our clone robot this year - since it was our first try at mecanum - has Jaguars on the drivetrain, and they behave just fine).

We always cover up the electronics board when drilling, and vacuum for shavings after doing so (while grounding the robot chassis).