Robot heart attack

[TK3950]

Originally Posted by stinglikeabee

Have you reverted to the original configuration (plug everything back in) with a fully-charged battery yet? Set a baseline and work from there. Maybe your diagnostic messages also existed prior to unplugging the systems.

We immediately put everything back into place and used a fully-charged battery, but it has made no difference. I suspect the diagnostic errors were probably there, but I can't be sure, as I never checked before.

Originally Posted by Secretspy97

Last year, week 5 of build season we had a similar problem happened to us. When the robot was enabled the cRIO wouldn't respond to inputs or print out data. We removed the cRIO and tried another one but had the same problem. Next we checked the digital sidecar. We went one by one removing the PWM cables to see if there was any small piece of metal shorting out the board. We eventually found the shaving and once it was removed the robot once again functioned properly.

The cRIO might be the problem, but I can't be sure. I thought that there might possibly be a shaving or other metal debris interfering, as I noticed quite an accumulation of dirt and dust. I'll check the PWM cables tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a short somewhere. I'm no expert, but it just seems odd to me that every motor controller would give the same signal if there was only one short.

[TK3950]

So our problem has been resolved!

We did a lot of troubleshooting today, and after going through many of the electronic systems one at a time, we finally go to the point of switching out to our old Digital Sidecar. Once we switched to the old Sidecar, everything suddenly worked (sort of). A few tweaks to the wiring and some cleanup work, and the robot was working almost perfectly (just a pneumatics leak we intend to fix).

The Problem
The Digital Sidecar was broken. It didn't seem like it was, though. It gave us the lights we expected, but wouldn't delivier signals. Turns out the Voltage Regulator at Q1 was fried. I'll explain more in a little while.

[protoserge]

Originally Posted by TK3950

So our problem has been resolved!

We did a lot of troubleshooting today, and after going through many of the electronic systems one at a time, we finally go to the point of switching out to our old Digital Sidecar. Once we switched to the old Sidecar, everything suddenly worked (sort of). A few tweaks to the wiring and some cleanup work, and the robot was working almost perfectly (just a pneumatics leak we intend to fix).

The Problem
The Digital Sidecar was broken. It didn't seem like it was, though. It gave us the lights we expected, but wouldn't delivier signals. Turns out the Voltage Regulator at Q1 was fried. I'll explain more in a little while.

Broken is the normal mode of operation I think they had quality escapes that somehow worked

It's great to hear you got it working. My team has been through at least 4 in the past two years; I feel your pain.