12V Voltage on Robot Frame (Perhaps because of a BaneBot)

[Dan252]

Originally Posted by electroken

Based on your description, it sounds like your frame is actually connected to battery negative. The polarity is irrelevant though.

Some RS-775 motors have been known to get internal shorts to the housing. In some cases these connections are intermittent and orientation dependent. I haven't seen this with any of the RS-550 motors with my own eyes, but the designs of the two motors are very similar.

While this condition will cause your robot to fail inspection, I doubt it is the reason for your communication problem. I would check for metallic debris in the Digital Sidecar and perhaps try another ribbon cable. Our Digital Sidecar can attract metal chips from distant planets.

Of course code is a possible culprit, but I'm a hardware guy so...

Thank you for your comment. We tried taking out our electrical board (made of poly-carbonate) and disconnect all the motors from the speed controllers and testing it outside the robot where there is surely no short. In this condition everything worked fine and the communication was solid. We didn't change anything in the hardware nor in the software. How can you explain this?