We’ve seen some odd Kraken failures recently, complete with possible internal shorting, loss-of-phases, and other oddities.
Two have displayed “jittery” LED codes and continued to operate while seemingly degraded (before dying entirely).
One entered thermal shutdown and never came back, saying it was disabled even when enabled and with good CAN comms.
One lied in the logs about how much current it was taking, let out the magic smoke and continued to guzzle current.
Seems to make no difference whether it’s a drive or steer motor, happening at random more or less. None were mechanically binding. Current limiting is applied, and flat tops are seen in the log files so we’re fairly confident it’s working correctly.
Trying to get to the bottom of it because replacing Krakens sure is expensive! But, hey, we have proof auto can score 2 game pieces with a busted leg! 
I’ve seen posts about some issues with wires, but nothing involving motors overheating or burning out since the firmware changes.
Anyone seen anything along these lines?
Thanks in advance!
8 Likes
I feel like it is worth noting that the swerve modules these motors were attached to (all these motor failures happened on the swerve drivetrain) had gears that were worn and shredded, leaving metal dust on top and around the modules.
1 Like
Some data from our most recently failed motor showing current drawn from our pdh for our swerve drive.
The yellow and tan graphs represent other steering motors on our chassis that are operating normally. The orange represents the motor in question.
It seems there is no correlation betcorrelationr in question and the other 2 normal working steering motors.
More graphs that can quantify other above/uncorrelated mentioned issues will be posted tomorrow.
You should contact WCP. They will probably want the motors back for analysis. The metal dust certainly isn’t good, but there could be other reasons for the failures. It would be helpful to know when your motors were received and how much use they have had.
3 Likes
Please post your code, and post what your current limits are at for each of your subsystems, and if its a stator limit or supply limit. Are you running the Tuner X swerve code? YAGSL? Advantage Kit Swerve? What control mode are you running on your motors? Are you using FOC?
I’m just a bit skeptical.
You can contact WCP, but I find it hard to believe a single team has had this much bad luck with Krakens when our team and several other teams I know have been using them extensively without similar issues. There’s got to be some root cause here.
Stuff like this also makes me a question a lot more about what you’re doing. Are you not greasing your modules?
Post your code up, I think that would be the most helpful.
Not on that robot. 
Other kraken SDS drivetrains we have which were greased haven’t seen those failures, which points us towards the metal dust intrusion idea, but we can’t confirm until manufacturer cracks one open,
