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.
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.
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 
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.
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.
One of the Ethernet ports on our driver station snapped off at our regional. If we’re keeping our old DS for 2010, it shouldn’t be a problem, since I recall being able to program the robot with a direct Ethernet connection between a laptop and the cRIO.
Also, we couldn’t get our servos to budge. It didn’t matter, since we ended up not using our camera anyway.