CAN Jaguar losing power temporarily

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

It's a real concern if the motor and mechanism attached to the Jaguars can be overloaded.

It happens pretty easily actually, there are a surprising number of configurations that will limp along with the Victors but with the Jaguars the various safety cutoffs will effect you.

My apologies apparently a leap was made from my term 'safety cutoffs' to the idea that I meant the Jaguar fault conditions. I did not intend for that to happen and hadn't noticed it after I lost track of this topic.

As said elsewhere in this topic, surely the Jaguar will start producing faults as the 'safety cutoffs' like the 40A auto-reset breaker exceed capacity but my point was more like this:

If a Victor and the electrical loads attached starts to overload a breaker the voltage will brownout rather rapidly causing resets that will pick up fresh referencing the PWM output. With PWM input the Jaguar will do the same eventually.

However, with the Jaguar in CAN mode the Jaguar under similar conditions might throw all sorts of faults visible over the CAN bus, but when it comes right down to it the cause is an electrical overload in progress. Eventually that electrical overload will get the better of you. When the overload exceeds the electrical limits that the Jaguar can tolerate you could see a brown out that causes you to loose your settings (Victors don't really have fancy settings so it doesn't matter to them), and if monitoring position, loose track of that (though there are other things that can cause you to loose some of these settings from what I've seen).

My point here is that the Victors being what they are neither report, nor have any other purpose but to start back up doing what they always do...monitoring PWM and responding with whatever brute force they offer. It's all you expect from them and frankly it's all you'll get from them. Simple, cut and dry.

It's hard to fault the Jaguars for the fact that the electrical systems involved are overloaded. It's also hard to say that's an optimal state of affairs (as the builder of the electrical and mechanical systems you have some control over it but that is a broad and complicated issue to itself). The Jaguar fault conditions on the other hand revolve around these transient overloads and that makes them often confusing (a case of too much information...because when you used to use Victors they never reported anything...even that they were starving for power). The thing is from what I see in the Jaguar firmware actions are taken like limiting the output which the Victors probably won't ever consider doing and those actions are about protecting the components like the transistors. These additional factors further complicate the chaos of the overload conditions with the Jaguars and possibly if they had more tolerance for overload you'd see less of it. Between the faults and a system on the brink of overload the extra information and limits of the Jaguars can cause strange patterns of response from software controlling them if you're not really careful.

As others have stated they've resorted to trapping the reboots. However, until recent changes in the firmware it was entirely possible to get into a locked up state within this chaos that forces a power down.

I wasn't trying to say that the Jaguars are incapable of handing the loads at all, on the contrary, I hope that people will try to reduce the loads so that the overloads are less persistent. These overloads are not great for the Victors either...they'll blindly push into them suffering reduced input voltages and electrical problems as well and they will reset, it's just harder to notice it.

In short: the Jaguars are just responding to a complexity you don't otherwise notice with the Victors, and they do it the best they can. The Victors just brute force it in a way that shields you from often noticing it. It's not as cut and dry as Victors are simply better...better would be to stop drawing 80A from your 40A safety devices (given that many of the common drive system designs can manage to do that repeatedly I am suggesting something that I know is easier said than done).