Relays Reversing On Their Own

[DRH2o]

I have 5 relays that will reverse on their own at various times. Nothing has to be happening to make this take place. I changed the controllers that are controlling these relays. There are no sensors or limits on these. They are not programmed to be controlled in reverse, just forward. There is nothing fancy in the code -- I did add set relay forward to off and ignore reverse before the loop in operatorcontrol. ????

[lasereyes]

I remember something from past experiences (I might be wrong), that the Tank control block and the OI to Relay (or OI to anything) shouldn't be 'placed in the same immediate loop'. I could be thinking of another problem, but I think you should try this:

Again, I'm not sure this would work, but try it anyway. Make a function and put in a 'Digital OI Input' and have it save to a variable (be careful, this var has to be an 'unsigned char'). Then have an If statement test to see if that variable == 1. Then put a SetRelay command and set it to forward. Following the If, i put an Else, and a SetRelay to set the relay to neutral.

I have an attachment picture which illustrates this.

I hope it helps.

[Kingofl337]

We have never seen any issues like you describe and your program looks fine.
You don't need to break up OI to RC based functions you can slap them in line just like you have.

I would check and make sure your backup battery is charged as it might be the RC reseting under a low main battery. You may want to fire up the IFI dashboard
and see if your joysticks have a messed up button.

[Mike Smith]

We had the same issue last year - and our pneumatics would not work. We had to reset the robot from the OI. We had a new programmer this year, and totally re-wrote last years program, and the relays would reverse on their own. I could turn the robot on, and let it set there doing nothing. At random times the relay would reverse, because a cylinder would actuate on it's own.

This year, it has happened twice - which is much less frequent than last year.

We had a fresh main battery, and a fresh backup battery also. So far we have had no luck finding the problem. We even tried to reinitialize the relays every time through the loop - to no avail.


Maybe we can solve this problem eventually!

Thanks,

Mike
1561

[Al Skierkiewicz]

This type of problem is capable with PWM cable that are not fully inserted. If you are using the newer Spike it is more difficult to get the cable fully inserted. Remember that the Spike input is a wire for each of two relays, it is not a PWM signal. If one of the inputs is intermittant and meant to be pulled to ground, the Spike will pull up when the connector is open. If your Spike has had the input spread open, it is possible to have an intermittant connection.