Is any part of your control system broken?

Technical Control System
#13

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.

#14

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

#15

Only thing that dosn’t work 100% is we cant get a battery readout voltage anymore.

#16

Our Jaguar spewed smoke just yesterday.

#17

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!

#18

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.

#19

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

#20

Oh darn, there’s no option for “everything”

#21

What do you mean “everything”?

#22

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.

#23

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!!!

#24

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

#25

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
#26

We had issues, not with the Digital Sidecar, but with the Analog Breakout.

  1. 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.

  2. 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:

#27

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.

#28

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.

#29

The RC Extension Cable update, released to teams back in November, addresses this issue.

I fully appreciate the intent of having the connectors locked in place. However, the particular solution chosen was a lot more trouble than it needed to be. It was impossible to remove a single servo connector from the Digital I/O pins on the Digital Sidecar without pulling on the wires to work it free. The couple of connectors we used with only a single wire installed wouldn’t come out without putting way too much force on that wire.

#30

we tried a couple times to get the 5v light to light up, and it worked fine before. I don’t have it with me currently, but I am pretty sure that we have shaken it an done all of that jazz to remove any metal shavings. It might actually be working properly now but i haven’t tested it yet.

The RC Extension Cable update, released to teams back in November, addresses this issue.

Thank you, I never got this memo, it is nice to see that this was a problem with other teams also. Doesn’t make me feel as bad about doing this :wink:

#31

2052 had our ethernet port 2 break off at the competition, so we borrowed one for the remainder.

We then brought our bot to a presentation at Medtronic, and ethernet port 1 broke off.

Prior to competition (during practice), our driver and a handful of other people decided it would be a good idea to practice in our gymnastics gym on top of the gymnastics mats. Surprise surprise, static came along and fried our analog module (I forget, maybe digital as well), and a jag.

#32

It was even better, it fried a digital, analog, and a solonoid(don’t know why it was in there, but it was lol)and what I think was two jags, being that a turret jag also only worked in one direction after that, but that could have occurred some at other time.