Power Control Panel Issues

[dcastaldini]

Hi,
So far this season, we've apparently had two PCP's go bad on us. It's not that they don't deliver power, it's that we seem to have issues with the robot draining new, fully powered batteries within a few seconds of driving them. Literally 10 feet and we drop from 119% to the 80% range. When diagnosing the issue the first time, we swapped out the equipment from the PCP to the battery, and everything worked as it was supposed to. We opened the bottom of the PCP and the soldier points inside looked odd. They were pitted and peaked...in short, they looked like there were issues with the connections. We thought that maybe some aluminium had gotten into it from drilling that had been done and maybe the PCP hadn't been covered well enough.

We encountered the same problem a week or so later, swapped the panel out with our last known good one, and the problem went away again. Inspecting the panels' inside showed similar patterns, but we were very much more careful about covering the electronics. We don't know if that's the way they are supposed to look...mostly because I'm unwilling to open up our last good one.

So, long story short, is there a good way to test to see if the PCP is malfunctioning? Is there a way to diagnose whether that is truly the problem and test it's functionality?