We have purchased the new Rev NEO Motors with the Spark Max Motor Controllers and have had issues with the speed control mode. When we use speed control, the lights blink orange and blue on the Spark Max Motor Controller. When we look it up, the chart says it means gate driver fault. The error has been changing between the follower and driver controllers. The error is not consistently occurring, but occurs often. We have read the example speed control code and we are following it closely. Are there any known solutions?
We’ve had the same exact issues that you have been experiencing. We have not found a fix for it, but we did contact REV and they did say that their new release (1.3.184) has a fix for random Gate Driver Fault errors. This weekend, we decided to move away from the Spark MAX and NEOs for this year. We feel that we are going to be much more comfortable with TalonSRXs and hope that a lot of these bugs can be ironed out by next year.
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As @sam.mulvey747 stated, there was a firmware update that helps with some of the conditions that would produce a gate fault. One improvement is to the brownout behavior of the controller.
Is your battery fully charged? Does the fault appear when holding a steady velocity or does it happen during the spinup, velocity change, or direction change of the motor?
The reason I ask is because the most common causes for a brownout is a discharged battery. When a battery isn’t fully charged, the voltage can drop significantly, even under moderate loading conditions. You’ll start seeing brownout issues when the motors are changing speed or direction, even though the robot runs fine under less extreme loading.
We updated the firmware earlier today and it seems to have fixed the PID speed control issue. Our battery was fully charged when using the speed control, holding a constant 12.6 V when ideal and around 12.4 V when driving.
The issue appeared when we would stop the speed control at the end of our command. We were driving straight at a constant speed of 3000 rpm, well within our robots capability. It appeared when going from 3000 rpm to 0 rpm/power. The issue is gone now with the firmware update.
We have encountered a new issue that every time set Idle mode is called, the internal encoder resets.