Today, we rewired the sidecar and disconnected all of the PWM wires that go from victors to the side car. Now, when they are not connecting and “snapping” all the way down on the side car. We got number 1 slot working and running the CIM motor through the Victor. We’ve tried forcing the wires down but we don’t want apply to much force in fear of breaking anything. We tried different wires and no success.
Do anyone here have any tips or ideas?
Thanks, Team 3481.
Shine a light down and see if you have debris that’s preventing the connector going all the way down.
Did you unplug the end at the Victors?
It’s possible (easy) to get the pins to miss the socket inside the Victor shell and still ‘feel’ like it is connected.
I’ve had this happen many times and all you can do is try a slight angle as you insert it until you find the spot.
We had a hard time getting ours in too.
Just wiggle them back and forth, pushing down, and eventually they will seat themselves.
Jon,
I suspect you are 1 pin off. Each PWM output block has an associated 6 volt enable jumper right next to it. I suspect you are trying to push your PWM cable so that one pin is on the 6 volt block and the others are not lining up with the PWM output pins. Use the flashlight approach until you are confidant.
I believe they just gave us crappy PWM cables this year. We’re having issues plugging them into the same PWM ports. Use older cables if you can.
Also, there is sometimes is a notch of plastic on the side. You can get some side cutters and snip that little piece off to help it fit into other spots on the robot. The PWM ports don’t have the issue with the notch, but just about every other PWM plug on the robot does. I believe they’re a part of the Fubuta PWM connector.
Al,
The issue is that the pins are too ‘fat’ to fit into the provided female end of the PWM cables this year. We got one of them on, only to find out that the plastic case split around the PWM cable. I don’t know if it’s an issue with all the PWM cables supplied, or just some. We’ve experienced the issue and decided to reuse ones from last year without any issue. We can use those cables for our Vex robots that the kids build around the classroom.
Oh fudge, we just encountered this problem this afternoon after spending an hour trying to make the cabling look neat and orderly only to discover that three of the pwm cables won’t properly plug into the sidecar because of this problem.
I also believe we got a batch of bad or wrong pwm cables this year. I notice that the opening that exposes the metal contacts on the wide side is on the opposite side from the pwm connector of the cables we have from prior years. This discrepancy is my tipoff that tells me which kind of cable I’m looking at.
One of the students brought this to my attention earlier in the week. The PWM cables from the KOP this year are quite difficult to seat. THey do work though… at least we wont have to worry about them falling out 