Hi,
We did receive the email, and checked all of the components you stated but the light is still flashing so we are inclined to believe its a programming error. We even had a mechanic and an electrician look at our robot and neither of them could see an error in the wiring.
Do you know of anything we should look for in the program
Thanks
Can you post screen-shots of your Begin.vi Teleop.vi and Finish.vi?
[strike]Everything[/strike] A lot of what you describe is consistent with an improper PWM cable connection. It takes practice to be able to insert a PWM connector into a Victor properly every time. Unplug one and inspect the pins. They should be perfectly straight. If any are bent, it’s likely that it wasn’t making proper contact.
Is the dashboard installed, operating and enabled?
LEDs will flash orange until the robot is enabled … right?
We have been using the basic code, except in the begin VI we changed the safety config to disabled and the Jaguar to a Victor.
It is Flashing orange unless the robot is moving, then there is no color.
Now that sounds like a Victor calibration/joystick centering issue.
The orange flickering light might mean that neutral on the joystick is right at the edge of the Victor’s neutral dead zone.
That’s not a dangerous condition, just annoying.
With the robot up on blocks can you push the joystick to it’s extreme’s and see the Victor status light turn green in one direction and red in the opposite direction?
So how do we fix that?
Does the code deploy without errors?
Can you Enable the robot from the Driver Station?
A screen shot of the Enabled Driver Station will help us solve your problem. Example, either take a digital picture or in Windows use the print screen function and then paste the clipboard into Word and attach the result here.
The Calibration instructions are on page 2 of the Victor 888 User Manual
But are the motors still not running even though the Victors are going from flickering orange to off when you try?
Or is the robot moving, but you just have a flickering orange status light when it’s supposed to be at rest?
We didn’t see any change in color when we pushed the joystick, there was no colors.
The motors do not move when the safety config in the program is enabled. When it is disabled the robot moves. The light flashes orange at all times unless the robot is moving, then no light is displayed.
The motor Safety is because something is slowing down the cRIO program or the communication packets.
You can run without the Safety if your controls remain responsive. If however you are experiencing any lag, then it becomes a higher priority to track down the cause for the slow down.
The flickering orange/no lights pretty much describe a calibration issue.
On the Dashboard there is a display with a green dot showing one of the joysticks movements. Does that green dot go all the way up or down when you push the joystick all the way forward/back?
And is the green dot centered when the joystick is at neutral?
Begin.docx (254 KB)
Here is a document with a picture of the vis.
Begin.docx (254 KB)
Begin.docx (254 KB)
Is there a reason you didn’t just attach the pictures directly? Embedding them in a Word document requires extra steps on both your end and ours in order for us to see them, and it messes with the aspect ratio and size, making it hard to view them as they were originally captured.
With the exception of disabling the Drive motor safety, it looks like a standard Arcade default robot project. Did you make any changes that aren’t shown, perhaps in Periodic Tasks?
Are there any messages on the Drive Station diagnostics display?
Alan that was my fault as I asked them to paste it into a Word doc. What would be the better way? Thanks
Just a side note since we don’t know if the software is working correctly, performing a calibration to the joystick may, I’ll say that again may make the problem worse.
I would really try resetting the Victors back to the factory default and then see what happens assuming the Victors will respond to the default function as indicated in User manual.
We had a similar problem with two Victors 884,s. They had been used on a practice bot this summer and worked OK. We tried multiple PWM cables driven by a cRIO, VEX and servo tester. In all cases we could substitute a servo for the Victor and it worked OK so we knew the signal was OK to the connector.
We removed the Victors and dissected each one. In both cases we found the problem was the PWM connector on the Victor. We also found a foreign substance on the contact blades. It looked like a glue or conformal coating.
To test we cleaned the three contact blades and attached the wires form a PWM cable. In both cases the controller came back to life.
That concern is very easily handled.
Download the default code and calibrate with that.
The same goes for testing the factory default. It should be tested with default code.
P.S. - to the students-
As a general rule troubleshoot one thing at a time.
Start from a known good position and advance into the problem step by step.
The default code and example code are known good starting points. The factory code defaults if you will.
Verify that the wiring is correct and responds properly to the default or example code before suspecting a code problem.
You immediately cut the list of possible problems in half - software vs hardware.
If your code worked and several things then changed and the robot no longer works, then reverse your changes to get back to a working state and re-introduce the suspect changes one-at-a-time, testing at each step.
I couldn’t figure out how to embed the pictures. But no other changes have been made.