Driver Station ESD sensitivity

[Eric Finn]

I just found out that you need to take ESD precautions around the driver station (grounding yourself, static mat...). Does anybody know any more details? Apparently grounding the metal case doesn't help.

How many people have fried their DSs? What parts of the DS are sensitive, if not the entire thing? How severe is the damage caused to the DS?

And how are we supposed to ground ourselves at competition, since we can't bring anything other than our control station?

[lando]

We believe that we fried our Driver Station with a static discharge from a plastic chair. Anyone knows if the damage is unfixable, if not how do we fix the Driver Station. Anyone know what the symptoms are if we did fry it, because we can power it up but the ethernet ports do not seem to be working.

[Francis-134]

Quite serendipitous that you mentioned this. Just last night, team 190 was driving around with the new control system and we managed to fry the DS as well. When we went to hit the disable switch, there was an electrostatic discharge that immediately killed the DS and at this point, it looks like it also took out both the Ethernet ports.

To mitigate this, I would suggest that if you have the slightest inkling of possibly sending an ESD into the DS, ground yourself beforehand (i.e., shock yourself before touching the DS).

[Ushio]

It seems that our communications have stopped all together, and we have to order a new DS. It's something about static, but I don't quite understand it.

But does anyone have any suggestions as to how to prevent it, both while practicing and at competition? It seems like an unavoidable obstacle.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. ^^

[Alexa Stott]

In the past, we have dangled a wire (or alligator clip) from the back of our robot to the ground. I'm not sure if it will work on the new flooring for this year, but it might be worth a shot.

[Ushio]

It's worth a try, but it was the DS that messed up, not the robot...

[Ushio]

We fried our's earlier today. We think it was static as well.

[Travis Hoffman]

OK, I can be "understanding" (see Team Update #4, Section 10) of a nonfunctional 5 VDC status LED on the power distribution board (we received one of these), because it does not hamper control system operation, but if this ESD matter with the Driver's Station becomes a widespread issue (I'd say 3+ teams, including one of the original beta teams in 190 - is a decent start in that direction), somebody of influence better "work through" this "blemish" and wrangle up a solution to the matter other than merely "Buy another DS" or "RMA it and waste 3+ days waiting for a replacement". Can anyone confirm that those responsible for the control system are looking to refine and update the DS design?

For teams who've been adversely affected - were your defunct DS's covered under warranty, or are you forced to buy new ones?

The Driver Station isn't "very exciting" when its sole functional task is serving as a large, blue, expensive paperweight. I don't recall ever creating any large, black paperweights with "Innovation FIRST" printed on the cover.....

We teams do not exist as a bottomless cash/time cow that must keep going back to the well owned and operated by the designers/fabricators of an increasingly more suspect piece of hardware. As one of the many people among FIRST teams responsible for releasing payment to FIRST for its endorsed products and services - the customer holding the pursestrings - I DEMAND a proactive approach to eliminating crippling, time wasting "blemishes" from control system hardware. You can tell us to be careful with this hardware, providing specific instructions until doomsday, but perhaps if someone were "more careful" during the DS design phase, such risks of ESD, firmware update, and other "brickable" possibilities would have been eliminated?

[Eric Finn]

Originally Posted by Francis-134

Quite serendipitous that you mentioned this. Just last night, team 190 was driving around with the new control system and we managed to fry the DS as well. When we went to hit the disable switch, there was an electrostatic discharge that immediately killed the DS and at this point, it looks like it also took out both the Ethernet ports.

Actually, it's *because* this happened to you that I mentioned this. One of your mentors told one of our mentors this morning, and our mentor called me.

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

The Driver Station isn't "very exciting" when its sole functional task is serving as a large, blue, expensive paperweight.

Getting a little zap and suddenly losing functionality of the Driver Station could be "exciting", although definitely *not* in a good way.
But yes, I do agree that they should have been more careful about designing their components. It seems that FIRST did not spend nearly enough time designing and testing their new system to ensure they were delivering high-quality components to teams. In my opinion, Alpha testing should have been two summers ago, not one.

[EricVanWyk]

FIRST needs to be made aware of all incidents - They can not fix things that they are missing information on. Simply accepting an issue and grumbling about how awful FIRST is does nothing to improve the situation.

For the Driver Station, report the incident to FIRST AND to KwikByte. Tell them exactly what happened and what the error is. The Driver Station is a KwikByte product.

FIRST is aware of minor DS ESD sensitivity, but as of this morning had no documented reports of the severity you describe. With out your data, they are blind.

[draconar]

As far as I know we haven't fried ours yet, but I noticed when playing with the dashboard in labview that just touching the casing of the DS with my hand would cause the digital input indicators to blink. This scared me just a little bit, but hopefully it won't actually cause functionality problems.

[Vikesrock]

In addition to what Eric said about letting FIRST know about the issue so they can be aware of it for potential future revisions we should also work to find ideas about what can be done to keep the DS's currently in teams' possession working.

The first step to this would seem to be to create awareness of the issue and for teams to then exercise caution and ground themselves before handling the DS.

At the competition perhaps FIRST could assure that the Alliance Station metal structure is grounded and make reminders at the driver's meetings to make contact with the metal before touching the controls?

[nathanww]

At the competition perhaps FIRST could assure that the Alliance Station metal structure is grounded and make reminders at the driver's meetings to make contact with the metal before touching the controls?

That's great for preventing damage at the competition--but what I suspect is that most of the damage to DSs will occur before the robot ever gets to the competition, just due to the time frames involved

Our boaard is made of aluminum and acrylic--do you think that just having anyone who's going to use the system touch the aluminum ribs would be enough to dissipate the static, or would the ribs have to actually be connected to something?

[jskene]

Our DS lost first one ethernet port, then both.
I suspect static discharge was the culprit. We will attempt to get it replaced under warranty.

[Ushio]

Everybody see Update #5.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really help that much...