First Programming - Victor/PWM help

[popnbrown]

So as a mentor this is my first step back into working on the control system. Unfortunately, I've been very out of touch with common issues and am having a difficult time diagnosing the issue that my team is having.

We've got a 4-motor powered 6WD, with each of the motors running off of Victor 888s.

Programming-wise we're using the Open 4 Motor vi in Begin to open up 4 motors and we are using the Tank Drive vi that's provided in the library. I should have gotten some screenshots in hindsight but it's a pretty straight-forward program.

By not-working below I mean blinking orange (like a no signal) and working meaning fully responding to the joystick for which it was correctly programmed.

So for a while our issue was that when the PWMs were set to 1,2,3,4 only PWM Channel 3 would work. So I switched the left motors (PWM 1 and PWM 3) and the right front victor (originally PWM 3) worked. However, I was unable to replicate this working with both PWM 1 and PWM 3.

I couldn't get that victor working on PWM 3 or PWM 1 again, so I flipped the PWMs for the right and left side. Then, PWM 3 (which was now on the front right motor) now started to work.

So I changed the PWMs to use 3,4,5,6 to see if it was a PWM Channel issue, but then none of them worked (and they still don't).

I decided to dig deeper into some of the WPI library. Clearly the joysticks were working and that was definitely indicated, and it also looked like the RobotDriveRef set up the 4 motors for the correct PWM Channels. However I was unable to Probe the Set Output vi to see if the value was actually accurately getting set to the right PWM Channel.

One of my leading theories was cables are not set in enough, but I've probably quadrupled checked them, and had two different students also put them in. The fact that two different victors worked and weren't consistent leads me to believe the issue is beyond just fitting wires. I'm semi ruling out bad PWM cables because of the fact that none of them work currently but did before. We also switched out one of the wires and it did not fix anything.

Any tips on how I can debug this or on what may be the problem?

I know this is hard to debug without being present or seeing things so please ask questions, I'll respond as quickly as I can.

My next experiment is going to be to image the cRIO and try this game all over again.

I'm going to have an orange light nightmare tonight.