Spike Problem

[mjgard]

We have everything hooked up and now our spike light only goes from orange to off. We have 4 spikes and 2 worked saturday and two went from orange to off and now a third one is going from orange to off and we only have 1 of 4 spikes working. Any ideas?????

[eugenebrooks]

The connectors (sockets) built into the spikes are notorious for being intermittent, and to a lesser extent the same problem occurs on the victors. If you had spikes work properly and then quit working without changing the code you are likely affected by the intermittent connection problem.

Your best bet is to be using new IFI cables. We had intermittent victors this year and switching to new IFI cables from the KOP cables fixed the problem. Last year we had one (new) spike that would not behave and swapped it out.

Eugene

[Alan Anderson]

Orange indicates neither of the Spike's two relays is being turned on. Off indicates both of them are. I can't think of a plausible way for a faulty three-wire cable to make this happen when you only want one of them on.

But faulty power to the Digital Sidecar results in weird things sometimes. It might be worth verifying that you're actually getting 12 volts (with the right polarity) on the connector.

[daltore]

We had the same problem with one of ours. It was a result of Backwards Power Man (a member of our team connected cables to a battery backward and plugged it into our router, which fried a 0 ohm resistor, thus he is now Backwards Power Man). Well, he struck again by plugging the battery into the M terminals of the Spike and it started doing the same thing. However, this was only for a couple of seconds. If you have a relatively large motor or one that is often backdriven connected to your Spike, or you reverse direction a lot, you may be feeding an inverse current into your Spike, thereby killing the relays.

Another possibility is that you may be drawing more than 20 amps with your motor. The one-time fuse in the Spike is slower-acting than the auto-reset fuse on the PD board (which is a good thing), and so if you draw more than 20 amps of current, the auto-reset fuse will trip first, and cut power to your Spike. Remember, the multimeter is your friend.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Aaron,
Backfeeding relays should cause no appreciable harm to the relay unless it is done repeatedly and without circuit protection. However, the Spike, Victor and Jaguars have no reverse polarity protection if you connect battery to the output. As I remember the Spike outputs are both shorted to the negative lead of the battery input connector when it is not powered, so the breaker feeding that branch should trip right away in that condition. I think you meant to say that the fuse on the Spike is a fast acting fuse but again it is in the positive power side of the Spike in series with the relays. This fuse may not trip if the Spike is wired improperly.