cRIO troubleshooting

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Conner,
I am guessing from your description that you fried a chip on the analog breakout board that plugs into the 25 pin connector on the top of the analog module in slot 1. From that description I believe you had reversed the battery leads to slot 1. In the process you damaged the five volt regulator on the board. That is the only chip on that board. The board is not reverse polarity protected. There is a single LED on that board that lights when correct voltage is present and the regulator is functioning. Unfortunately, simply replacing the chip may have not repaired everything on the board.
It is also possible that a slot on the Crio is defective. Often this occurs when foreign material drops into the connector or a pin on the connector is bent. While a bent pin is sometimes recoverable, generally this is not the case.
Please remember that the battery voltage on this board is used (through the jumper) to sense battery voltage for the Crio. Should it fall to less than 5.5 volts, the Crio disables output for motor control. The intent is to allow the battery voltage to rise and prevent the Crio from rebooting. The power supplied by the PD may fail when the battery falls below 4.5 volts. This voltage (as sensed) is also passed to the dashboard and is read during the match by the FMS.

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

The board is not reverse polarity protected.

One small update...

The Blue PCB Analog Breakout (circa 2010/2011) is reverse polarity protected.

The Red PCB Analog Breakout (circa 2009) is not.

But if they are dropping heavy objects onto their Breakout boards and modules then all bets are off.

[Sconrad]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

It is also possible that a slot on the Crio is defective. Often this occurs when foreign material drops into the connector or a pin on the connector is bent. While a bent pin is sometimes recoverable, generally this is not the case.

Based on our attempts to isolate the problem, it seems that at least two of the slots are defective. We thoroughly checked both and there don't seem to be any pins bent or foreign matter. Therefore, we think that the board within the cRIO is damaged. Like I said earlier, this cRIO had the misfortune of being underneath a flipped robot, and so it is likely that this caused initial, unnoticeable damage and that, over the course of the years, the damage has increased until the slots malfunctioned. Thanks for your suggestions though!

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Conner,
The Crio is built like tank. I would be very surprised if the accident led to your current failures in just two slots. However, I would suggest sending in for a diagnosis. We had a Crio complete failure due to conductive fluids combined with power on. There were several circuit traces that dissolved.

[Sconrad]

We found that one of our analog slot 1 modules was not working with our other cRIO. While we have not confirmed this yet, we think this could mean that slot 1 on the broken cRIO might still work. The busted analog module's 25-pin connoector port was bent, so it is possible that it caused a short that damaged a chip on the board (I am mainly a programmer, so it is possible that I am totally wrong in what I am saying as I am totally out of my area of expertise)