We ran into an issue today where our Battery was drawing a ton of voltage with different batteries. We ran all day Saturday going over bumps and running at full speed with no problems. Today however, when we tried to diagnose our voltage drops, we noticed that the PDP status and Comm lights were not showing any color. This was especially strange because, every light on the talons, bridge, and roboRio was working, and we could still connect and drive the robot.
After this, we attempted to look at the robot from the roboRio interface. We could recognize all of our Talons as well as our CAN interface. Everything was normal, except the PDP did not show up on the web interface. Along with these tests, we also “jiggled all of our wires”, measured voltage and current throughout the PDP board, and checked all of the breakers. As far as we could tell, everything was electrically sound and the exact same as the day before. Along with all of this, we actually plugged in our spare PDP and it worked correctly on the same exact setup we had the broken one on.
We started having the issue when our inexperienced drivers were accidentally ramming the robot full speed into our castle. I don’t think this was what caused it considering we were running it over obstacles at the same impact speed just a couple days before.
What I’m wondering is that, is our PDP broken internally and gone forever? Is there a way we can fix this? And what do you think caused it so we can prevent killing our next one?
Thank you 