Or at least that’s what we think. Here’s the story. I was updating to the new version of RobotC, and doing all that entails. I’d the robot on for about 10-15 minuets up to this point, testing a few motors, when we started smelling something funny. After finding all the motors and batteries(using two) I opened the cortex was and there it was. On the underside of the PCB, there was a capacitor that had apparently been melting away at the cortex plastic. This is a cortex i have been using since the 2012 season, and have not had any problems with it until this point. I wanted to post this here to see what others have to say, especially since I am intrigued as to what may have caused this, and I know very little about computer engineering. Four years of VEX and never seen something alike. Many thanks in advance. Pictures linked below.
Yeah, that’s a burnt H-Bridge. It happens when there is a short on a motor connected to the Two wire ports 1 and 10. It has happened to us a few times before. They can be fixed pretty easily if you have a microsoldering tip though.
Could anyone else help in the diagnosis in of this issue?
Sumant did (and he has plenty of experience with this). A short somewhere fried one of the mosfets in your cortex. Send it in to VEX for repair (although that one may or may not be repairable, hard to tell from the photo).