Digital Side Car Error

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Hi all,

We are having some weird issues with our practice DSC, and hoping someone might have some relevant advice.

The side car will drop into a strange state after a duration of use. In this error state, the PWM outputs die, or work sporadically, but with an incorrect map of input to output. The relay 5-8 red and green leds turn on, as well.

I first found this error after driving the robot full speed into another trailer. As soon as it hit the obstacle, everything died. After troubleshooting for a while, we swapped the DSC to our backup and the problem seemed to go away, leading me to believe there was a hardware issue induced by the large shock.

After a little more testing, the 2nd side car reverted to the same (not working) state. No shock this time.

Interestingly enough I am still able to read encoder values off the DSC even though I can not output to the motors.

I have not swapped back to the original DSC yet, and the robot is still a sitting duck. I also swapped the DIO module in the cRIO before swapping to the second side car.

Any ideas?