Digital side car signal light on but not blinking?

I have a problem.

My digital sidecar’s signal light is on but not blinking. All other lights on the digital sidecar are on. I have checked the breaker on the PD, the power going to the digital sidecar, and the serial cable. None of this has helped. However, we are still able to run all the jag’s and run our drive-train.

Any help would be great!

                                                             Thanks,
                                                                         Max

Still not having any luck with the light. The light on the DSC is solid, all functions work, driving wirelessly works, yet the light is still solid. Not sure what’s up, we have tried diagnostics up to our knowledge.

Need some ideas.

Which light are you talking about? The RSL? That should be solid while the robot is enabled (It will occasionally blink while it is enabled if network drops a packet). It should blink while the robot is disabled.

  • Oliver

It should blink slowly while disabled and during teleoperated. It should be solid during autonomous.

No the DSC have its own three status lights. I have never actually watched the DSC status light to whether its blinking or not…

Those should be solid. They indicated power to the DSC.

I’m having the same issue. The RSL stays solid all the time: disabled and enabled in teleop.

From the post so far, I should expect the RSL to flash while the robot is disabled and during telop?

Correct, the flash should be fairly quick during Disabled, and quite slow during teleop (I thought this was just due to dropped packets since it is a pretty long time in between flashes). Does the actual RSL (From Allen Bradley stay solid?) or the light on the Digital Side Car (next to the pins for the RSL)?

Good luck,
Oliver

Neither have I, which is why diagnosing this issue has me wondering what’s wrong.

To repeat, we are talking about the RSL light on the DSC itself.

The LED on the DSC next to the light is also solid, ie the RSL orange light plugged into the DSC is the same as the green LED right next to the orange light connector on the DSC. What controls this? Is there Labview code somewhere that I can’t find or mistakenly disabled?

I believe this is handled by something that teams shouldn’t be able to modify. That said, the FRC specific things preloaded on the robot are (iirc) the FPGA image, the FRC_Network_Communications.out file, and the CAN driver (if you are using one). I believe those are the things that do not vary language to language, and I don’t think the RSL control is in any of them (I suppose it could be in the Network Communications module, but I doubt it). If those statements are true, then the RSL control must be in the downloaded code, which means if the Library gets modified, the RSL control could be modified. Does someone with more experience with the inner workings of what is responsible for what have any ideas?

  • Oliver

have you had any luck? Sounds like we have the same problem. No fix for us yet.

I’m the lead programmer on Akash and Max’s team. I reimaged the whole thing for LabView and reformatted to v43 (and then back to java)–to no avail. I then disconnected the digital sidecar, and took a new one, and put our wires in there. The new digital sidecar worked. I suspect that we had a faulty dsc, but it could have been in part healed by the reimaging. SOLVED

Luckily we’ve got 4 DSCs, not sure what caused the problem with this DSC, but we will post up if we figure out what was wrong.

I haven’t figured it out yet. We might try a new DSC. I’m guessing the bad printer cables that came with reversed wiring may have messed up the DSC RSL. I’ll probably give the DSC swap a shot tomorrow. By the way, we have two CRIOs and both of them showed the same RSL behavior (same digital modules).

I would love to hear if the DSC swap worked for you! Good Luck!

Think you missed a post :stuck_out_tongue:

I found that replacing the Digital SideCar worked too! Reimaging the cRIO was not necessary.