Getting the battery voltage

[Joe Hershberger]

Originally Posted by billbo911

Well, the jumper checked out normal. So now we are at a loss. We will have the robot out of the bag for four hours this Saturday, hopefully we can figure this out.

Does anyone else have any ideas what may be preventing this from working correctly?
Again, it worked fine until we did the last cRio and DS updates.

Any chance your code is now opening channel 8 on its own? This will cause a resource in use error. I'm guessing your module is ok since you said the gyro works... metal shavings in the db15 connectors can kill the slot and make all channels return 0.

If you have both analog modules installed, you could read the battery voltage from the slot 2 module.

-Joe

[Tom Line]

We've seen this before when the analog breakout itself went bad at MARC last year - we were helping the robot next to us and NO one could figure out why they weren't getting battery voltage - so we started swapping out hardware.

You might try swapping your analog breakout.

[billbo911]

OK, found the root cause of our issue. The "Diagnostics" tab on the drivers station is what pointed us in the right direction.

It turns out that one of our new programmers, a true genius but not experienced at programing, had placed a call to AI8 in the begin.vi that no one knew about. We are not using his portion of the code, so it was deleted and now we have a voltage displayed on the drivers station!!

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by billbo911

The ONLY thing we changed between when it worked and when it didn't was the curio firmware and the DS software.

Originally Posted by billbo911

It turns out that one of our new programmers, a true genius but not experienced at programing, had placed a call to AI8 in the begin.vi that no one knew about.

We see here a reason for people not to get upset when the "experts" are unwilling to accept claims that nothing changed before something broke.

I'm glad you found the problem. I'm especially glad that you found it based on the diagnostic messages provided by the system.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

We see here a reason for people not to get upset when the "experts" are unwilling to accept claims that nothing changed before something broke.

I'm glad you found the problem. I'm especially glad that you found it based on the diagnostic messages provided by the system.

Thanks Alan!

We were tearing our hair out, wait, no, I have no hair, over this one. We had swapped out the AI module, the breakout board and the jumper with no success. We were at a loss. The I remembered seeing the diagnostics tab. "What the heck" I thought, "lets see if it says anything helpful". Duhhhhhh, error on analog input, resource already in use. "Oh man, let's look at the code again". And there it was.

It's funny, I have made a living for the last 28 years troubleshooting systems. I have found that error messages are not always helpful, but sometimes they are. I have found that familiarity with the system is your best tool. I must say though, this error message definitely was helpful.

Add this one to the lesson book.

[jhersh]

Originally Posted by Joe Hershberger

Any chance your code is now opening channel 8 on its own? This will cause a resource in use error.

Originally Posted by billbo911

It turns out that one of our new programmers, a true genius but not experienced at programing, had placed a call to AI8 in the begin.vi that no one knew about. We are not using his portion of the code, so it was deleted and now we have a voltage displayed on the drivers station!!

Hmmmmm...