My team has been having issues where our motors stop running and we get an error message saying “Error - 3 CTR: CAN frame not received/too stale” we aren’t sure what it means but it seems to happen the most on our elevator. We’ve never seen this before and I checked the entire wire chain so I doesn’t seem to be a normal CAN error. When we self test the talon it shows the reset during enable sticky fault, and right now we just blink the led on the talon to clear it. But I would hate to have this happen during a match so has anyone experienced this, if so what was happening and how did you fix it?
We’ve received that error too. It’s only happened a few times, but I don’t recall the motors stopping or being disabled. I’d be interested to know if you guys find a solution.
We had a Talon SRX with the exact same issue. It was intermittent when we ran the system that the motor was powering. We tracked it down to a faulty SRX ribbon cable that had some of the insulation scraped away from the wire. After replacing the ribbon cable, the issue went away. If you’re using the data port for feedback, make sure the connector is pushed down tight, and that there are no breaks in the insulation. It wouldn’t hurt to also vacuum out the port, in case any shavings or debris worked their way in.
To add a bit more to pifighter’s comment:
We also saw similar behavior on some Vex slice encoders. We had a ribbon cable that wasn’t crimped correctly. Sometimes the motor controller that the ribbon cable was plugged into would work, sometimes it wouldn’t. Replacing that ribbon cable fixed it. I strongly suggest that as a wiring good practice, all the CTRE style ribbon cables should be covered with something this:
That may or may not be the right size - I think it’s a bit large. Those cables have very thin insulation.
Also, use NIMAX to look at your can motor controllers and see if you’re getting sticky faults by doing a self test. We found that you only get the stale error message when we were requesting data from a controller experiencing the problem by using the Status VI, like checking voltage. We added a voltage check to every Talon to walk back and see where the error was REALLY starting from, and found that every talon on the Can bus was getting that error because the 1st talon was the one that had the bad ribbon cable plugged in and it was disrupting every motor controller down steam. CTRE actually helped us diagnose this problem, so a huge thank-you to them.
What that stale message really means is that particular motor controller has not updated it’s can frame in the allowable time. You may be able to keep running that motor controller if the fault is intermittent and occationally lets a frame through. In our case it was dependent on how the cable vibrated and if it touched the metal edge it had shorted-out on.