Wiring previous-year banner sensors

[Cjmovie]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

It sounds like you have everything wired properly: 12 volts to the power (brown?) lead, ground to the ground (blue?) lead, and one of the signal lines (black? white?) to the digital input. You do have it to the SIG pin of a DIGITAL I/O on the Digital Sidecar, right?

The output of the Banner Sensor is essentially a switch that is either open or closed to ground. You won't read a voltage on it unless you supply one yourself, or if you connect it to something that supplies a pullup. The Digital Sidecar inputs have such pullups, so things should be working for you (they do for us -- we are using a Banner sensor as well).

The pullup on the Digital Sidecar won't work if there is no power coming to it. Double-check that the DS has all three power LEDs lit: 12v, 5v, and 6v.

All lights on the digital sidecar are active - we're able to run other sensors (e.g., limit switches) off of it well enough, as well as servos etc. It's really a confounding problem - I can't figure out anywhere that something is wrong, but at the same time, it's as if nothing must be right :-)
We also tried connected the line up to the analog bumper to get a voltage reading in, like I said - it was also powered, and operational (as we have a battery voltage reading on the driver station).

We had the NC/NO hooked up to the various colors of a PWM line, however, the ends of these went to the proper points on the digital sidecar / analog breakout. We had both NC/NO wired on one wire with it sideways on the line of signal inputs (perpendicular to the normal method) so that we could test both at once - nil.

I assume it would be smart at this point to try swapping the digital sidecars out?