The 8.2 (or 8.3) Battery Voltage Bug

[Mike Bortfeldt]

We had the same issue with the OI displaying an 8.2/8.3 battery voltage (changed by the .1 volts when disabled). It was sporadic for the most part. One of the last times we had the issue, we were able to perform a number of code changes, download and attempt to isolate the problem. It seemed to be related to a particular (custom) code module we were using. We commented out all the code in the module, but left in the file variable list, and still had the issue. One by one, we removed the variables until we removed a specific structure and the problem went away (we had several variables of the same structure and some were still defined, so it wasn't the structure itself). After we thought we identified what was causing the issue, we started adding things back in until we were back to the original state of the module and couldn't recreate the problem (so was it the structure or did it just fix itself?). The only ideas we had at the time was that we shortened the variable section size such that the compiler placed the data in a different memory bank. It sure looked like some of the IFI variables were getting stomped (txdata, rxdata maybe?). After this, we switched to a spare 2004 controller we had and made the slight modifications necessary to get our code to run on that. We had no problems for the last week before ship using the old controller. I was really hoping that the new libraries were going to solve the problem, but it will be hard to tell with it being so intermittent. We have since gotten the 2004 controller upgraded by IFI and will try some testing on that this weekend.

One other item of note: the first thing we did when we saw the 8.2 voltage problem was disable all our user interrupts. We also deleted all the code from the InterruptHandlerLow to ensure that if we still had one active it would generate a red code error condition. It didn't help.

Mike