so far so good. nothing broken or inoperable
Thank you for posting this poll.
As of now the only thing we have broken is 1 Analog breakout by wiring the PD with reversed polarity (luckily everything else is polarity protected). It is also lucky for the student I never found out who it was :ahh:
However, our system has very little runtime under its belt to this point.
I will be watching this thread closely to see what kind of failures teams are experiencing. The DS in particular appears to be plagued with a variety of problems. It is very worrying to see a respected, thorough team such as 25 posting comments such as the one Wayne has posted here.
So far nothing has broke on us (then again we have not fully tested everything).
Hopefully everything holds up.
Nothing is broken yet knock on wood, but i have noticed that teams are having problems with the DS. There was an update a while back that made it mandatory to ground the DS. I recommend that all teams do this soon. Also, always remember to touch the robot or some large piece of metal before touching electrical components.
We had a Spike fail; the cause was pretty obvious: the 12V and ground were wired into M+ and M-, and my clue that something was wrong was when the circuit breaker tripped about 15 times and the wires got really hot.
We also have had a lot of pins bending; one bent completely flat after we put the relay module back in – it didn’t respond, so we took it out and discovered this. It was incredibly nerve racking to have to unbend this pin YESTERDAY – no time to get a new CRIO from NI if it was irreparable. It was probably the scariest thing I’ve had to do :ahh: but it works now. Just be very careful when inserting modules and only remove them when you must…
I also had to unbend pins on the digital sidecar, but I suspect these got bent when someone dropped a battery onto a jaguar… yeah, that left a nice dent.
One of our team members wired two Jaguars backwards (Like, power in the motor side and motor on the power side), one of them survived though.
~DtD
Only thing that dosn’t work 100% is we cant get a battery readout voltage anymore.
Our Jaguar spewed smoke just yesterday.
This afternoon one of our programmers uploaded an updated program for the robot. It uses tank drive and we needed to add a couple of victors to control our collection system. The code loaded fine, but when we restarted the robot the Driver Station displayed the following:
Team: 2333
System: Watchdog
Mode: Teleoperated
Battery: 00.00 v
DS Rev: 2009-02-10a3
And everything quit working.
Do you have any suggestions? Our Robot is dead!
Our team also has had difficulty with the DS ethernet ports failing. We also have implemented the grounding modification and constructed per the rules. Ports appear to fail when we are tethered. Generally our robot is on wood blocks under this condition and we do have conveyors moving, so we are thinking ESD is the problem. Both ports on our original DS failed, and then 1 more on another DS. I think there may be inadequate Transient Voltage Suppression on the Ethernet inputs in the DS. If this is the case it is unclear whether the transient is between the Ethernet Differential Pair wires or between the ground level of the DS and CRio. I am betting on the later. For whatever reason, the cRio side seems to be more robust. FIRST so far has been great in working with us on replacements, but we are concerned as we head to competition we will have no choice but to operate tethered which appears to be the worst situation. Advice to all teams is to have a defined procedure on how to hook up tethered and make sure all follow it. We are located in the dry winter Northeast so it would be interesting to note if teams in more humid locations are suffering similar failures.
One compliant I have with the control system so far is the Digital Sidecar male 0.1" header pins.
Our male pins are starting to get bent and destroyed just from wiring up the electronics in only 6 weeks. At this rate I will have a backup driver station because I know the driver station pins will eventually break.
In future years, I hope FIRST switches to female connectors for the DSC similar to the VEX controller.
Female header pins, http://www.vexrobotics.com/vex-robotics-microcontroller.shtml
Male header pins, http://first.wpi.edu/Images/CMS/First/digital_sidecar_rdax_600x357.jpg
Oh darn, there’s no option for “everything”
What do you mean “everything”?
At DC regional we had not one, but two driver’s station failures. First one lost ethernet port 2, the second one lost ethernet port 1.
When port two failed the link light continued to behave normally, but you could not communicate through the port.
Port one failed while connected to the robot. We successfully downloaded and ran several test programs. It was then time for another practice match, but we could not establish communications with the CRio. Bad port again. In this case the link light stays on (slightly dim, but no flickering) even when cable is removed.
Our drivers station randomly stopped working after the Washington DC regional. we also lost a Jaguar the week before the competition. Both were replaced free of charge!!!
Ive noticed that when you use a PWM/Servo wire with the Digital sidecar, If it is “tabbed” like the Futaba servos, it will not work. The tabs prevent the male header to fully fit on the female pins on the digital sidecar. Our team (more like me) didn’t notice that this was happening, and some of the headers were not connected properly. They were slid over one pin, and thus rendering them useless. We don’t know for sure if this is what caused our Digital sidecar to fry, but now we have no 5v regulated in one of them. but thankfully we had two!! (quick fix; if you take an exacto knife, you can quickly cut off the tabs)
Lesson learned: Always have another person Double/triple check the wiring before turning on the robot! You can never be too careful. I am working on writing up a “checklist” so when someone is double checking the wiring, they look at everything, and then check it off. hopefully this will help to prevent future “stupid human errors”
-Kyle
Kyle -
Can you confirm that the 5V rail is broken, and not simply shorted? So far, all of the cases of “broken 5V” were actually “shorted 5V”. To check, remove all connections from the offending board and apply power. Check the 6V LED (the silkscreen on the case is backwards :() If it still doesn’t work, check for any metal shavings that might be shorting.
- Eric
We had issues, not with the Digital Sidecar, but with the Analog Breakout.
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The plastic cover made it nearly impossible to align the pwm cables properly. Our solution was to take the cover off, thread the cable through the opening, insert the pwm cable and reattach the plastic cover.
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The wago power connector stopped making a positive latch and started working loose. This caused our pod potentiometers to be unreadable, thereby disabling our steering. We will need to revert to hot glue…just when I thought we didn’t need it anymore!:eek:
We have killed 3 driver stations with static. They were all grounded to the case like the manual states… I don’t think this does anything.
Our competition room has a static problem without the regolith, and the crappy drivers stations. So I don’t blame it all on the drivers stations, but I do think they should be made better.
Teams should have already done this, as it was mandatory to compete this season.
On 254, we haven’t broken anything this season. However, during the beta test with 668 and 100, one of the ethernet ports on the driver station snapped off.