Digital Sidecar Ports are dropping out.

[Tom Line]

We have been having an issue with one of our digital sidecars and the PWM outputs on it.

This sidecar was running 9 victors originally. Ports 1-9. Camera code / servo code etc had been removed for a long time, so there were no PWM assignment conflicts.

The robot ran just fine for 1.5 regionals. However, half way through the second regional, PWM port 9 stopped outputting a signal. The 5V power was still available on the power pin of the PWM, but the signal was not. Plugging it into a victor resulted in the blinking light of no-signal.

We then moved it to output 10. We checked our wiring for continuity and grounds. Suspecting the pwm cable, we tried 4 different cables with the same result. This victor was powering a single cim into a dewalt transmission that ran our shooter.

Output 10 worked fined until we arrived at the Michigan State Champs. When we powered on for a system check, we got the blinking light of no-signal on the victor again. During the trouble shooting, we swapped PWM cables and the victor. We also checked top to bottom for grounds. Finally, we moved it to PWM 3 (and disabled our cowl tilt).

This PWM ran for 1/2 of the Michigan State Champs - then the signal disappeared. We rechecked 9 and 10, and the signal on those ports had not reappeared.

Finally, we changed to our backup breakout board. We didn't have any more failures at MSC.

Has anyone else seen these issues, or is anyone versed enough on the internals of the breakout board to possible suggest a cause? I'm going to take the board apart and search for failed components once we get it back to the team room.