ADXL345 I2C Accelerometer NOT WORKING

[Phalanx]

I've experienced quite a variety of issues, but let me share what I have done to get it finally working to some degree. This is using the Labview example with I2C interface only.

1) Make sure the cable you use to connect from the CRIO to Digital Side Car is correctly pinned and in proper working order.
a) We found our round molded ones from previous years to be faulty as others have described here.
b) We tried the ribbon cable from last season (from Andymark irrc) which also did not work for us.
c) We repaired this years ribbon cable, which does work.

2) Make sure your connections to the accelerometer as well as to the digital side car are clean and good. It appears from my testing the I2C is very very sensitive to poorly made cables and it will have a large impact on it's ability to communicate.

3) When using the example I2C, I found I had better success when I ran the driver station application on the same laptop as the example. I noticed in the example code an open/close for the driver station so I started running it.

4) Even with all of the above, sometimes it works, sometimes it fails to respond, sometimes it works for a while, then fails. All the failures are a failure to respond.