We have had a persistent issue with our NEOs, where they don’t start without a kickstart, manually moving them to get them started. In addition to our electrical team for some reason being skittish about spending the rest of the season putting their fingers near running NEOs, it would seem to be against FIRST regulations to have a team member ride the robot during competitions.
A mentor dug up a CD post suggesting that the issue was faulty connectors, but I couldn’t find the thread. In any case, our connectors seem pretty solid, at least by our previous standards. Has anyone else figured out how to prevent this from happening? Is there a way to wire them up more securely?
That sounds like an encoder wire failure, rev has a trouble shooting guide for NEOs. I would pull test every individual sensor wire and check for good contact into the spark max.
We had that issue with our shooter the other day. It was a bad Anderson connecter on the negative wire from the Spark Max to the Neo. I was surprised it even worked when we found it, but it did. Edit: By worked, I mean after the kick start, the shooter actually got to full speed. There was no error reported in the Spark Max console.
Perhaps, I do not really remember. However, I do remember how frustrating it was, as well as the incredible opportunity to teach students how to troubleshoot a problem (without the added stress of doing it at an event).
We seem to be having the same problem, but our neo will work in voltage mode but not with pid without a kickstart. Is this indicative of an open phase?
Ok let me clarify. Pid is technically inaccurate. We are using ControlMode. Velocity but with constants of 0 and with arbitrary simple motor feed forward from characterization. This is the flywheel. Do I need to get it moving with raw voltage and then turn on calculated ff?
I wasn’t the person setting this up, I just took a picture of it after he got it working…
We also had an issue where the firmware was not loaded properly, it didn’t give an error, just didn’t work right. But reloading the firmware magically made it work.
Our NEO kickstart problem on our drivetrain turned out to be a loose sprocket on the motor shaft (missing key!!). Totally threw us for a loop but we had an open phase on a NEO last season that made it not always start and depending on what the motor is used for you might not notice once it’s moving.
Hold up. If I’m send the simple motor feed forward the current rpm instead of the velocity setpoint, it will not work as intended right?
(Partially rhetorical question, pretty sure that’s the issue)
