Troubleshooting shorted ODrive v3.3 board

Support
1

Hi,

I have 2 ODrive v3.3 boards connected in parallel to a 24V 15A power supply and I’ve been using them for a while now for testing. I was testing sending commands over USB from Raspberry Pi 3. Only one of the boards is flashed, the other one was never flashed since I got it, my plan was to figure out everything on the first one and to flash the second one at the end, but it was still connected to power, motors and encoders
So last time I plugged in the power supply one of the motors on the active board doesn’t spin at all during the calibration phase, I figure there’s a glitch somewhere and just unplug and replug the power supply thinking that a reset will make things better. But this time the power supply doesn’t turn on and needless to say that even the other motor doesn’t go through the calibration phase.
My first assumption was that the power supply died as it was a fairly cheap one. At this point I unplug the power supply and try to replace it with a 6s LiPo battery to continue my development but to my surprise when I try to do that there’s a huge spark and the 6mm bullet connectors I was using get melted and charcoaled, the battery can dish out over 200A at 24V

So my question is did I do something wrong? (I plugged in and unplugged the same setup at least 10 times before this happened) and how can I better diagnose what exactly happened?

I measured the resistance of the power connector on the board and the presumably burnt one has a value of 0.3 ohms or less and the other one over 10k ohms

Thanks,
Cristian

2

Hm there are many possible reasons that the power rails can get shorted, though I’ve never come across something like this with the ODrive before.
So to help figure out what’s going on, did you find that the shorted surge fried/burnt part of the ODrive board somewhere? That can give us a hint about what path the short current took.

Sorry about the trouble, let’s find out what the problem is, then find a way to remedy the situation.
Cheers.

3

No, my visual inspection did not detect anything visibly burnt
It looks ok and my electronics skills are not advanced enough to figure out how to do anything else than look at it :slight_smile:
I am available to schedule a Skype video call if you think that would help

4

Sure, let’s do a Skype call. I’m available today until late, and tomorrow and Thursday at 11am and after (Pacific Time).

5

Thank you, great support experience!

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