V5 motors going bad

So, we are up to eight motors that have gone bad (out of 200+). Two scenarios: 1) no light comes on the motor, Brain doesn’t even recognize anything is plugged in, 2) light comes on, recognized by Brain, but soft squeal when you try to turn the motor and it doesn’t move.

Any ideas as to what the problem is? ESD?

Are they recoverable? Will VEX replace them? At the least, you’d think they’d want to know for quality control.

Yes, VexOS was updated to VexOS 1.0.3 as soon as it was released.

hi! I’ve had 4/20 go down to your second scenario. Vex replaced all of them.

You will need to send a email including you order number and then call them to get an answer because they don’t answer emails anymore.

Easier said than done. :wink:

Yesterday when I called in I was caller #18. After 30 minutes, I hung up and I was only caller #15.

Important to note you HAVE to email them first . I waited online for 30 minutes the second time I tried to file a claim just to be told to email them… it was frustrating

I have … its been four days and no response.

I was kind of hoping someone knew the cause for at least one of the two scenarios. I know it was a long shot.

@action000 you can do “differential debugging”, at least, to test the power issues.

For that you would need to disassemble both a good and a bad motor to have access to their PCB. Plug them both into V5 brain, and then use multimeter to compare voltages at various check-points.

In my experience this is a quick and easy way to zoom in on the power issues on the devices for which schematics is not available.

We has the second scenario happen, except the port was blinking and not a static red light on the port. After troubleshooting we found that the motor was not the problem, but that we blew out a port.

We have had 5 motors die on us, 3 in similar ways to scenario one and 2 more like scenario two. They have died on vexOS 1.0.0, 1.0.2 and 1.0.3. The only correlation seems to be the brain we are using, we have 8 teams at our organisation using v5 and we are the only one having issues with motors. I don’t think our motor issues were caused by static discharge, 3/5 of our motor casualties happened outside of competitions and there are no obvious sources of static where these motors died.

All this being said VEX were very good at sending replacements however spares were very hard to source at competitions when they died and it is kind of annoying we are having so many issues after all the delays etc. we have had to endure.

Same problem here. Dead batteries are a bigger problem since there are no spares - at least I have extra motors. I’ve emailed after being told that I have to email first, only to receive no response. 10 days later, I finally get to talk to a human, and they haven’t even read the email yet…no RMA number, no return label, I usually get the replacement parts but still have a box of stuff that doesn’t work, doesn’t have an RMA number that I don’t know what to do with.

I understand that they are overloaded, but part of that problem has got to be that they have no system for dealing with this problem and if they do, it’s certainly not a good one.