Who has released the Magic Smoke!!! [Archive]

meatmanek

06-02-2007, 20:36

It does always seem to happen. Usually from the Victors, for some reason, but we've managed to burn out two cameras this year (before you let new members touch the camera, make sure they know that if you plug stuff in wrong, you can break it)

Magic smoke from alligator clips does not count, unless you vaporize the wires themselves (possible.)

MattLi

06-02-2007, 20:38

Define "Magic Smoke"

Xufer

06-02-2007, 20:41

I released the magic smoke from a servo durring prototyping, i tried running 2 servos together to perform a task not really suited for a servo ... end result smoking, heating up, melting of plastic. Fun fun fun!

Alan Anderson

06-02-2007, 20:52

Define "Magic Smoke"

Magic Smoke is what makes electrical devices work. It's put inside them when they are manufactured. If it ever escapes, the device stops working.

This is similar to the Magic Noise which makes mechanical devices work. If too much noise comes out of something like a planetary gearbox, it too stops working.

meatmanek

06-02-2007, 20:57

why dont you just blow the stuff up if your not going to wire it right

We've had numerous Victors go bad over the years and release magic smoke for no apparent reason. In 2004 we had a case where we heard a pop, smelled magic smoke, saw a spark, but everything seemed to work. (we later discovered that we had only destroyed one of the three transistors)

Be careful mounting components near your metal frame - the frames tend to build up quite a bit of static charge, and FIRST doesn't like people to ground their frames, in order to cut down on shorts. We believe static discharge from the frame into a Victor caused the mysterious spark.

EricH

06-02-2007, 21:26

Magic Smoke is what makes electrical devices work. It's put inside them when they are manufactured. If it ever escapes, the device stops working.

This is similar to the Magic Noise which makes mechanical devices work. If too much noise comes out of something like a planetary gearbox, it too stops working.Actually, there are two types of magic smoke. Magic White smoke winds up in all the electronics, and Magic Black is in anything non-electronic, along with the Magic Noise. If you release the Magic Black, grab the phone and call the Fire Department if there is no fire extinguisher available.

(And then there are the stress sensors--too much stress on you and something stops working. Built in for all electronics; available as an upgrade for mechanical items.)

MattLi

06-02-2007, 21:33

And there's the magic spark that comes after the magic smoke and magic noise. Magic spark is not to be toyed with. Magic spark is very dangerous and should not be in contact with any robot parts and or human parts.

EnderWiggin

06-02-2007, 21:40

I was told not to operate any heavy machinery after inhaling the magic smoke.

Andrew Blair

06-02-2007, 22:16

I was told not to operate any heavy machinery after inhaling the magic smoke.
This stuff might be a bit different... But still, might be a good guideline.

My opinion- your machinery probably isn't operable if you've let the smoke out...

RyanN

06-02-2007, 22:23

Last weekend I made Magic Smoke on purpose to show the effects of too much current flowing through a small wire to a person on our team that couldn't grasp that idea. I was having too much fun!:D

Cjmovie

07-02-2007, 00:16

We had a little issue with last year's light just before the season started: We were transporting it on a rolling chair, and the way it was wired meant we had to pull a wire to turn it off. However, that pulled wire then had a free end to do anything it'd like to: Including touch the opposite wire's end. Burned a nice hole in the chair and battery. Not to mention the way-cool look of the wire after the event.

The wire literally melted itself into the battery and then re-sealed itself. I stopped it by kicking the chair over, because it'd be pretty stupid to touch anything at that point.

Uberbots

07-02-2007, 00:31

I arc'd a globe motor and a genie came out...

i still havent gotten my 3 wishes

Molly Stieber

07-02-2007, 09:55

Ha! no magic smoke yet, hopefully i won't see any.

POLISH703

07-02-2007, 10:45

We were testing our arm and we thought a banbot motor would work. Nope. It released lots of magic smoke. But it was a good oops. Better now then at the practice rounds. We upgraded to the globe motor, works great and no back drive unlike the fried one.

ChrisMcK2186

07-02-2007, 11:02

It started out well, with the electrical engineer wiring, well, wires into a victor. I had complete faith in him. A series of twelve magic bangs, lots of magic sparks, magic smoke, and magic smell, and about twenty seconds, my faith faltered in him a wee bit. Luckily we had an extra speed controller, so no harm, no foul. I'm watching him though.:cool:

Chris

Dick Linn

07-02-2007, 18:58

I used to work at a place that manufactured magnet charging equipment, among other things. An engineer was prototyping a new model that would be capable of generating a pulse with 40,000 Joules of energy. Talk about magic smoke! Components would disappear off circuit boards. Wires would vaporize before the insulation had a chance to melt. He was constantly invited to go work in different locations of the plant after a smoke incident :D

Some magnet chargers go up to 110,000 Joules at 2,000 volts DC. Repair technicians call them "widow makers" :ahh:

K.Porter

07-02-2007, 21:22

I magic smoked a PWM control wire earlier this year...still don't know how exactly.

Someone plugged the camera signal cable into the wrong port on the robot controller. On goes the power, up in smoke goes the *ground* wire (of all things) on that cable. Camera seems fine...the robot controller is a bit glitchy still (which makes me paranoid) but nonetheless, it seems to work still...

Never smoked a victor though. Three years so far and I'm trying to keep that going.

RyanN

07-02-2007, 23:28

Had our first run of our robot today, and luckily no magic smoke; however, we have yet to wire up the camera, potentiometer, and diagnostic light.

Matt Gardner

07-02-2007, 23:34

We haven't had any magic smoke from the bot itself...yet. Accidently connecting a main battery to itself created a nice magic smell and magic sparks, though. And draining the backup battery INTO its charger, very magic. We seem to have bettery issues...

insomniac6688

08-02-2007, 00:06

one of our mentors while working on our prolight mill blew the metal fileings away from the mouse.... into a powerstrip.... thankfully the mills fine and the powerstrip did what it's built to do so after a quick shot of air all was well :D

Alex.Norton

08-02-2007, 00:18

I remember the day that we used a robot battery to let the magic smoke out of our floor... The battery is dead but the floor seems to still work odly enough.

Plepel

19-02-2007, 23:54

Last year, one of our members shoved the tether cable into the bot right before our match started.

You know the main breaker with the little red button on it? Yeah, the little cap thing that protects the terminal fell off, and the tether cable came into contact with it.
I didnt know that much magic smoke could fit into one wire. It was billowing out in white smokey clouds!

The inspector came over and almost didn't let us compete in that round :(
But we got to!

Heh...at least it didn't burn ;)

Cyberguy34000

20-02-2007, 00:37

Sadly, we just lost our magic noise in our banebot transmissions. They worked just fine, and then, a few days ago, the magic noise screamed out of it, and it refused to move any more :(. Fortunently our chief magic man Neil, knew enough about magic noise and magic smoke to put magic lubricant and magic noise back into the transmission. It worked! Well, for a day or two, and then just an hour or so until crating, the magic noise escaped again! So we took off the arm and will probibly replace the banebot with another transmission that still has it's magic noise in it.

Be careful about that magic noise! It will try its hardest to escape its imprisonment in the banebot transmissions! But don't let it! If you do, curses and angry spirits will posses the poor souls who are trying to finish the robot. You have been warned...

-Chris

RyanN

20-02-2007, 01:56

We finally released some magic smoke today! Thankfully not from our robot or operator interface. Our vacuum cleaner released it from a burning belt after sucking in a huge string from our carpet field. :D

NumBeast

20-02-2007, 02:31

I was having troubles with our backup battery. The charger seemed to drain the battery when the robot was turned off and I had lost our last battery. I finally got tierd of it all and connected the main battery directly to the backup battery port, not realizing I was adding an extra 2.8 volts.

Wow the smoke was awesome. we made smoke signals to each other and had lots of fun with our no longer functioning RC

Akkifokkusu

20-02-2007, 02:39

No Magic Smoke from our robot, though the gearbox has produced some of the fabled Magic Noise. Quick fix to that, but it scared us.

Tonight, though, as we're shaving weight off our robot to prepare for shipping tomorrow, the Dremel has produced lots and lots of Magic Smoke. Magic Smoke also tends to bring about Magic Heat. Thank god we have a big fan.

AdamHeard

20-02-2007, 03:44

Two victor fans blowing through the holes on the FP and/or BB motors has saved us from the magic smoke so far; However, we have smoked FPs plenty of times before.

waiakea11

20-02-2007, 12:46

Well we had magic smoke yesterday.....and we sarted panicking because we had gotten so far on our bot and shipping day was today!!!our covers came off in like 4 seconds and everyone was trying to turn the bot off....luckly everything was fine and our mentor wasnt there to witness it...

Lavapicker

20-02-2007, 13:14

But he does read the posts...magic smoke eh? I did see the wire that looked like insulation had been burnt off. Good job it didn't set off the fire alarms in the library! That would have been a great end to robotic season???

Christian

20-02-2007, 14:35

A couple of days ago, we magic smoked two rs-540s, it wasn't just wisps, it was complete smoke, almost flames (our arm was too heavy). Then there was the switch. The signal cut out, the switch caught on fire, and the robot went running and crashing into the practice rack, on fire.... it still gets pretty hot, maybe a defective switch... I don't know, but it was funny, sad and scary at the same time.

billbo911

21-02-2007, 21:06

Did you know that PWM cables contain a very LARGE amount of magic smoke? This is what they can look like after you let it out.
This happened when the PWM cable pulled out of the Victor it was attached to and the ground wire slipped into the +12 vdc connector feeding the Victor.

Dan_Karol

21-02-2007, 22:08

We smoked our bane bots motor with attached gear box the day of ship :ahh: .
we should have a replacement by our regional along with code to prevent it from happening again.

-Dan Karol

Mike

21-02-2007, 22:23

Vikesrock

21-02-2007, 22:49

We let out some magic smoke from one set of analog inputs on the RC after some excess winch cable shorted between some uninsulated spike terminals and some analog pins. Good thing we aren't using them all anyway!

waiakea2024

21-02-2007, 22:52

We finally have this past Monday. Luckily nothing was damaged. The wire that shorted looked really bad though.

savage301

22-02-2007, 11:01

We toasted both of our small banebot motors. We ended up not using them anyway. I like the Keyangs much better.:D

devaaki

22-02-2007, 20:12

Cool, it's team 2024 in hawai'i... greetings from 2025 from Minnesota!!

I was hooking up the y-cable PWM to the camera when the other side of the y dropped onto the 120amp breaker nut and grouded out. The ground cable shot up a huge cloud of fetid yellow smoke.

Then a few days later an RS-540 fried itself because our arm dropped down past the limit of travel... turned the insides nice and charcoaly.

Orominuialwen

23-02-2007, 01:00

I released the magic smoke for the first time in a very unusual way several weeks ago. A friend and I were drilling holes in spring steel (used for deploying our ramp & platform) with a block of wood clamped underneath it for stability. The spring steel and wood released the magic smoke on every single one of the eight or so holes we drilled, but fortunately spring steel can still function just fine without its magic smoke.

Unfortunately, spring steel also feeds on the blood of Mechanical Team members, which we can attest to by all of our sliced fingers. We actuallly ended up briefly running out of bandaids in our first aid kit, that spring steel was so hungry.

FIRST Rocks

23-02-2007, 10:17

About a week before ship day, I attached a PWM cable to the relay port on the RC so it would be ready to connect to the spike relay when it was mounted. I foolishly left the wire hanging loose. A few days later, the loose end slipped into the backup battery ground terminal. The wire was laying across the RC, so when the magic smoke came out of the wire (lots of it), I thought it was coming from the RC!:ahh:

efoote868

23-02-2007, 19:12

Our old battery boy was the magician of all magic smokes. He set a record of producing it 3 times at competitions. :D (and we still won safety awards... makes me wonder what all the other teams were doing wrong)

While demonstrating the power of the big cim to our freshmen, our of our victors blew its magic smoke. an arc about 4 inches long, and a bunch of scared freshmen. Now they all believe in magic smoke...

ChristinaC

23-02-2007, 20:41

One of our victors released its magic smoke.

And I believe the RC did as well, but it still worked afterwards. Not bad... ;)

pogg

05-03-2007, 09:19

Team 540 has realesed the Magic Smoke one or twice during the build season.

Tom Line

14-04-2007, 22:43

Sorry Kyle - I couldn't resist.

One of our electrical team members this year decided to power one of the larger muffin fans directly from the battery.

He must have misread the amperage rating. mA != A.

It melted the positive wire in half, and spot-welded the free end of the wire to the battery. There were little pieces of charge wire everywhere on the floor.

I've never seen him move so fast....:D

Mister_Juggles

15-04-2007, 17:05

Well, we were *originally* going to use the BaneBots motor to lift our arm... Need I say more? :p

Monochron

15-04-2007, 18:26

We released the smoke while testing our electronics. There was a short in a motor controller and when we tried touching wires to it from the motors to make sure they worked someone got a hot reception and our robot lost its smoke virginity....*tear* they grow up so fast....

Rapt0r9

22-05-2007, 21:04

I actually released magic smoke from a USB Flash Drive. I broke off the USB connector and decided to open it and solder on new connection wires. I read the pinout backwards and the drive stopped working for some reason.

Our team burnned out a camera last year and we have burned 18 AWG alligator clips by using them as battery leads.

JBotAlan

22-05-2007, 21:19

I am proud to announce that we have not released any magic smoke this year.

We (a freshman, actually) wired an Anderson pair reverse-polarity, though, making for popping circuit breakers and a whole lot of confusion.

And then there's last year's doozie:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/24374

I did see a plume of magic white smoke rise from a pit at GLR this year...forgot who, but I do remember we all stood back and clapped.:D

We still have IRI, so who knows what might happen...:yikes:

JBot

Adam Y.

22-05-2007, 21:37

cire

23-05-2007, 07:58

We have never let out the magic smoke in our 5 years, I guess we have a cautious electrical team. We also have never used the FP or banebot motors..

dtape

23-05-2007, 09:11

1686 released alot of magic smoke at Beantown Blitz

Brandon Holley

23-05-2007, 10:19

1686 released alot of magic smoke at Beantown Blitz

yes they most certainly did! and they came back running no problme their next match

Qbranch

23-05-2007, 10:48

Magic smoke from alligator clips does not count, unless you vaporize the wires themselves (possible.)

Well, once I did create some firewire on my old Lionel model train set... burned right through my styrofoam base, then into the old pingpong table underneath, shortly after part of the wire turned to ash. :ahh:

Also had some sparks and fireworks (along with some welded aluminum) come out of an ill-fated battery clip I used on a slapped together pair of robots for a demo... was something like a ford Pinto, blew up on a rear end collision. :ahh: but... well most of you herd about that one already... my right hand sure doesnt let me forget about it... oh and I always wear heat resistant mechanix gloves often now whenever near a robot... :o

-q

Protronie

23-05-2007, 19:31

oh and I always wear heat resistant mechanix gloves often now whenever near a robot... :o

-q

With YOUR safety record... I'd suggest a full fire proof close prox suit and hood with SCBA!
Maybe with some knee and elbow pads. :ahh:

Zyik

23-05-2007, 20:49

One of the freshmen plugged a battery in backwards and it exploded... I hope thats all the magic smoke for this year.

Bomberofdoom

24-05-2007, 02:52

Sigh, we had a major Magic Smoke that cost us a....can't remember the name of the motor, but it was something like a mitsubishi or something.... anyway, we tried our Jacks program on one of the "legs" and the program didn't seem to want to stop the motor from running while at it's maximum...
There goes a $100 motor that took us 3 weeks to get. :yikes:
Eventually we didn't get to use it too much in the comptetition, but except that and a slight smoke from our arm globe, nothing else, we were fine. :cool:

Oh yeah, and it was a programming team guy who did those both msitakes.

Aroki

20-09-2012, 22:49

We had magic smoke come out of one of our banebots during the Buckeye Regional practice match 3.

Also we were doing some "amputations" to our robot and got a bunch of metal shavings in our cRio/power distribution board. Luckily another team saw and warned us to vacuum it out before someone turned the robot on.

Gregor

20-09-2012, 23:15

Woh holy thread revival!

And, everyone has released the Magic Smoke.

Saberbot

20-09-2012, 23:27

A few of us on the rookie row at Galileo last year got magic smoke from all of our chargers. Somebody hit the power drop with a robot cart and shorted out the three phase.
It was pretty scary when six pits all started smoking in sync. Thankfully, the electric company bought us all new chargers.

Andrew Lawrence

21-09-2012, 01:03

A thread from 5 years ago was revived and I'm not behind it? I never thought I'd live to see the day.

We've had magic smoke come out of every single robot component at once before. We were having serious problems before it happened for a few days. After a few seconds of magic, it all stopped, and everything worked perfectly from then on out. :confused:

Ankit S.

21-09-2012, 01:58

We released magic smoke from our banebot that was powering our ball lift at competition this year. Turns out a screw came loose and jammed itself in some polycarbonate. Cue magic smoke!
What was worse than releasing the smoke was taking off the still burning motor and replacing it in time for our next match, which was only 10 minutes away.

Astrokid248

21-09-2012, 09:32

Since the thread is from 5 years ago, I think 2011 is fair game still. Last year's bot was actually named Magic, so we ended up naming the minibot Smoke (in general; each individual minibot was named after the Beatles) mainly because of what happened to the M&Ms at Lone Star with their magic smoke and our minibot. Also, slightly unrelated, but we lit a kitbot on fire once. That's an entirely different flavor of magic smoke right there. One of the Victor heat sinks was badly chipped and the Victor decided to spontaneously combust.

EricH

21-09-2012, 13:16

I had some magic smoke released on a piece of equipment I was working on. I'd seen wisps here and there for a while, then one day I saw a largish plume. My dad says he saw flame; I didn't as I was too busy going after the stop button on the controls, which cut off the power to that circuit. Next step: lock-out, tag-out the machine until the part could be replaced.