In qm125 on Newton our drive can dropped dead after going over the charge station. When we got back to pits we saw no faults with the bus but the CANivore itself had a green stat light but a red double blinking CAN light, which as per docs says no can communication.
The issue ended up being the usb c cable that we were using had somehow “gone bad”. Replacing the cable fixed the issue. I’ve seen this failure happen once before under similar shock circumstances but am confused because somehow the actual cable just stops functioning as well — the connection isn’t even loose it’s just not transferring data.
What is the actual issue here? Does the shock the chassis undergoes do something to the CANivore / USB-C cable? Or can cables just fail like that?
USB cables are not universally very robust. I recommend getting nice, flexible cables from Monoprice or Anker. I’m having trouble finding one that’s as flexible as I would like, but the Anker ones are fine.
For what it’s worth I don’t know where the USB C cables REV sells Spark MAX controllers come from, but we’ve seen first hand the metal type-C connector on that orange cable get bent 30 degrees from some kind of impact and it still kept working. And yea, it may seem odd we use the REV USB cable on the CTRE CANivore but uh… it’s the right length for where we mounted it.
We had a similar experience during the build season and thought we had a bad USB-C cable. It turns out that was not the case but was due to a roboRIO CANivore interaction. Once we removed our USB camera and upgraded the CANivore firmware to 23.2.3.1, we have had no issues.
