Differences between the 2009 ans 2010 Digital Sidecars (re: disabling).

[Philbot]

I have question about changes from the 2009 Digital Sidecar to the 2010 Digital Sidecar.

The reason for my enquiry was an extremely odd situation that occurred during robot testing today.

We were driving our robot around (over bumps) and after a hard impact; it disabled itself (or so it seemed).  Long story short, we found that some metal shavings had gotten down into the 2010 DS that was installed, and was causing intermittent +5V Power problems.

So we replaced the DS with a 2009 DS that we had as a spare from last year.

The robot proceeded to run normally, except for one thing….   When the robot was disabled, it still proceeded to run the compressor.  And it wasn’t just running mindlessly, it was responding correctly to the Pressure switch.

So even though the robot was disabled (we even unplugged the Wireless Gateway), and the Victors were disabled, the Compressor relay was fully operational. 

We tested several components to see if we had caused some other item to fail because of the impact, but the CRIO, Relay Module, and Solenoid Breakout all checked out.  We even re-loaded several old software versions, but the compressor still ran when disabled (starting and stopping as air was needed).

In the mean time, we had cleaned out the 2010 DS, and decided to place it back in the robot.  When we did, the compressor went back to behaving correctly (stopping when the robot was disabled).

So the only thing that I can think of is that the method used to disable the DS has changed from 2009 to 2010.

Can anyone shed any light on why the 2009 DS should act this way with the latest cRIO/Labview image?

Phil.

[Ben_S]

Philbot,

That is strange! Did you try more than one 2009 Digital Side Car? Perhaps the one you were using also had some issue (such as metal shavings).

[Philbot]

No, we didn't try another... (we'de have to gut last years robot

But I've not seen a situation where stray metal bits have ENABLED the robot to drive outputs while disbaled....  (bearing in mind that the compressor wan't just ON, ir was responding to low pressure requests).