Talon SRX - 3 Dead

This weekend we played at our DCMP and ran into some frustrating issues with the shooter and I was just curious if anyone else has ran into something similar with the Talon SRXs.

In our first match shooting, we realized about after 1 shot, the motor would no longer spin up. We’re running a minicim to a versaplanetary 1:1 with integrated encoder combo. After closer inspection in the pit, we realized the motor controller simply did not turn on, even after disconnecting the motor and encoder from the system. We verified our connections to CAN and the PDP were solid, tug tested the wago wires, and tested different ports on the PDP to make sure it wasn’t an issue with the breakers. Eventually we swapped the motor controller out with a new one and hit the practice field. About 20 shots with the new SRX (same system as before) and no issues. In the next match we barely got out a shot before the motor controller died once more. We swapped, tested, and a third one died. After some reading we decided to ditch the encoder wire and PID, switching entirely over voltage bus for the remainder of the day.

The most interesting/unusual part of all these breakdowns was when we brought a busted SRX over to Marshall (cheers 900) and he confirmed none of the controllers had burnt out. His theory was that somehow we shorted an internal connection and wiped the firmware, effectively bricking the SRX.

Has anyone experienced something like this before or knows how to “unbrick” the SRX?

Have you contacted Cross The Road about the controller failures?

Even if they don’t have a policy to make it right (I’d assume they do?), it certainly couldn’t hurt for them to take a look and tell you WHY the units failed.

I hope you get a good answer. We had a similar thing happened. We have a CIMcoder going into our Talon SRX, and I think some shaddy soldering of resistors onto the Talon SRX breakout board for the CIMcoder shorted out the CAN bus. Still powers up fine, just can’t get any CAN communication.

I emailed CTRE awhile ago and never heard back. I figured I’ll try again after competition season is done.

We cooked an SRX when we had a limit switch accidentally grounded to the frame and also accidentally had our off board compressor wire (+) touching the the frame. Lots of smoke from the small ribon cable and the Talon was done. Nothing like a stupid wiring mistake to throw away over $100 in 2 seconds.

Hey Jon,
Go ahead and email [email protected], if you haven’t already.

@ahartnet
I don’t see your email anywhere, are you certain you contacted us? Resend when you get a chance.

Found out it never left my outbox folder for some reason. Hopefully it’s made its way to y’all now.

Should have figured something was up when I didn’t get a response pretty quickly.

Just a theory. We wanted to try to recover one of them but didn’t have all of the necessary bits available in a timely manner without interrupting robot work. I’d still like to try if you want to try and get one to us but I suspect Omar and crew at CTRE will be able to provide you with a fix. Controller did not have the magic smoke smell and nothing seemed wrong with it from a visual observation standpoint.