Spikes are not working

[ArzaanK]

Hi Chief Delphi,

We are having some problems with our spikes. Our spike is plugged into relay 8 on the digital sidecar, and we have the 12V and the GND prongs plugged into the power distribution board. The colour of the LED on the spike is orange. We also have a 20 amp breaker in the spike.

We used the following code to get the relay running.

Relay *compressor; 
compressor = new Relay (8)
if(primaryController->GetRawButton(1)){
//primaryController is our joystick. Drive code works fine with this joystick. 
compressor->Set(Relay::kForward);
} 
else{ 
compressor->Set(Relay::kOff); 
}

We have used the same code to get spikes running on robots a few months ago. We have also tried replacing "kForward" with "kReverse" and "kOff".

When I enable the robot, I press and hold the button to enable the spike, nothing happens. Also, we put a multimeter to the ground and signal ports on the digital sidecar and we did not get a voltage reading.

Our team is stumped at what is wrong. The wiring looks to be correct, and we know the code works since we have used the exact same code before.

We have tried this setup on two different robots, with two different power distribution boards, two different digital sidecars, multiple PWM cables and multiple spikes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.