I was in the middle of a driver skills run and my cortex started smoking.
Port 1 on my cortex seems to be completely broken and the motor is difficult to spin even when not plugged in.
Did I fry the internal motor controller? Is there any way to fix this or avoid it?
Hello tabor473,
Thanks for taking the time to contact us and visit our forum.
You are correct, you overheated and damaged the internal h-bridge of your Cortex. This means you will no longer be able to use port one.
Unfortunately we cannot restore the port once burned out, and its best to simply replace the Cortex under the 90-day factory warranty. If outside the factory warranty, I recommend using a VEX Y-Cable to make up for the lost motor port.
In order to avoid this issue, please use ports one and ten for intake motors. Drive motors consume much more current; therefore, increasing the chance of overheating.
Good luck in your future tournaments.
Regards.
It was my intake. And I had issues upon using a Y cable were my drive would cut out 1 motor. My original wiring had 1 intake arm and drive motor on each breaker with more drive motors on the power expander. The rewiring with Y cable I attempted put am extra arm motor on one breaker but I seemed to trip the breaker running 4 393s running at relately low power.
Does the broken port impact the breakers tripping?
tabor473,
No, a damaged motor port will not affect the thermal breaker normally. If the damaged port created a short on the board, then extra current would be flowing through the Thermal Breaker. The extra current could cause the Breaker to trip sooner.
In order to investigate further into this issue, please confirm what kind of programming software you are using and at which version?
I await your confirmation.
RobotC
3. something I will check later today which version exactly.