New Jaguar firmware version 101

[gpetilli]

Originally Posted by slibert

Hi David,

We are using black Jaguar's over CAN, in Speed Mode, and have been experiencing cases where some of the motors shut down and have to be rebooted to work again.

After a lot of investigation, we are confident that the CAN wiring is OK, I guess you'll have to trust me on that one....

We updated to Firmware v. 101 in hopes that this behavior would change, but are still experiencing shutdowns requiring reboot.

To reproduce the case, we've narrowed it down to driving full speed (250 rpms) in one direction, and then rapidly shifting to driving the other direction at full speed. We have enabled the automatic ramp mode in hopes that would help, but it does not eliminate the errors.

W/the 2CAN web page, we monitor the current, we see it spike around 43A on one or two of the motors during the direction change.

In the diagnostics page of the driver station, we see getTransaction failures (indicative of CAN bus communication issues) reported right when the motor stops responding. Specifically, the error messages are:

<Code>-44087 ERROR: status == -44087 (0xFFFF53C9) in getTransaction() in C:/windriver/workspace/WPILib/CANJaguar.cpp at line 425

One or more (but not always the same one) motor will stop responding to drive commands. The jaguar light is solid yellow on after they stop responding to drive commands, and the 2CAN web page continues to be able to monitor the bus voltage/current, so it's clear that CAN communication is still working.

Using BDCComm, we view the status of the jaguar that is in the non-responsive state, and Comm errors are reported but no others.

We're discussing working on a software-based ramp mode that hopefully avoids the rapid changes in speed, but we are puzzled at this one thing:

- Why do some of the Jaguars no longer respond to drive commands until we reboot them?

We had similar problems last year trying to run speed mode. We saw instantaneous currents reported by the jaguar of over 90A!! The fact that you see the VBUS voltage drop to 7V at only 43A indicates that you definatly have a supply problem. The 2012 KOP gives us 10gauge wire instead of 12gauge in previous year - probably for this reason. Last year we added periodic polling of the jaguars to verify they were in speed mode and re-initiallized them if the were in vbus mode (did not know at the time that they logged faults).

You said in your post that you enabled ramp mode. I too was hoping this would improve things this year but have not tried it yet. My read of the release notes has me thinking that ramp mode only applies to voltage control modes (PWM, percent VBUS, VCMP). Did you do this with software commands or with the limit switch jumpers? Can you confirm that it had any impact?

General question for Jaguar experts - I remember seeing a post last year and can not find it now that said the Jaguars would re-enumerate on reboot and you could trap that message to detect fault instead of polling. Anyone have details on how this might be done in Java?

[Levansic]

Originally Posted by gpetilli

General question for Jaguar experts - I remember seeing a post last year and can not find it now that said the Jaguars would re-enumerate on reboot and you could trap that message to detect fault instead of polling. Anyone have details on how this might be done in Java?

I just read about the enumerate on reset, today, and had the same thought with respect to using LabView. Our team was working on a babysitter.vi, to query the mode settings once a second, but we'd much rather catch the enumerate and wait 100ms to reconfigure.

The only downside is the fact that if the voltage drops enough for one Jaguar to reboot, then most or all of them will be rebooting. Not sure if they will join the enumeration in progress, or if each one will re-issue the command.