WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

Just a warning to teams who haven't yet discovered...

Our new camera for autonomous mode fried at our team meeting tonight (oops :yikes: ). Here's the layout of what happened so you guys don't make it turn bright orange and smoke...

• Camera assembled with two Servo's attached (all in correct places)

• Camera system hooked up to a PC

• Camera's PMW and power supply attached to an '04 Robot Controller, hooked up to a modified cordless drill

• and here's what made the mess... Wires from Servo external power supply hooked up to a cordless drill battery.

Here's a web-page one our of mentors found about this issue:
Finally, power is needed for the CMUcam2. Be very careful at this stage, reversing the polarity of the power source has a rather spectacular effect as I found out myself first-hand. Smoke, sparks and a dead CMUcam2. The positive (red) cable should connect to Vdd and the negative (black) cable connects to Vss.


Highly recommend NOT doing :rolleyes:

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

:ahh: wow, sorry to hear about that. But thanks for posting..................now i will always check my power connection for the cam.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

I do not understand "and power supply". The camera gets all power from the PWM connection (according to the documentation I have)...

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

you can power it using whatever you want, and methinks they decided to use a cordless drill battery (btw what gave you that idea? is it the right voltage?). But this is probably a good thing to take note of, as it should apply even if you are using the pwm power hookup (though I am sure I have hooked mine up backwards a few times so I dunno why ours is ok....? I actually managed to make ours track a target today. It was a great moment.) Im sorry to hear about your camera though.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

The following is quoted from the camera manual:

The included diagram is from the camera manual.

NOTE: The first setup assumes that the camera is connected such that the servos are powered from a PWM cable connected to the Robot Controller.

The camera pin diagram can be found on page 12 of the manual.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

If you look at the PWM hook up, you will see that ground is the outside pin, hence, I would guess that if you failed to heed the many boldface warnings, and hooked up the PWM in reverse, little would happen, as there is no closed circuit.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

7.2v

That's how much power they take.

If you look on the RC, you see that the output from the PWMs are 7.2v

Our head programming mentor hooked it up to a varible powersupply connected to the correct pins, and it ran fine.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

did anyone happen to get a picture of this spectacular event?

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

You could try recreating it with your camera. ;)

If this isn't a reminder to make sure that your connections are always right, I don't know what would be. Thanks for reminding us of that - I know I'll make extra sure of it from now on...

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

The correct thread title should be "WARNING - New camera parts with magic smoke". See http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...877#post106877

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

Hey...drills are my friends....well okay, so we had a few lying around....

Sorry, no, but I can recreate it. . .
Small cubical, to the right of the keyboard was the camera and its accessories. Power cords clip onto the battery and at that moment, right along side of that computer adapter cord, a very bright orange glow emits and smoke billows up. Many crackling sounds, the light goes out...and the room smells like magic smoke :)

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

Can Anyone post a picture or tell me how they mounted their servo motors to their camera box?

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

Well I can't tell you how they did it, but if you download this and then open the "start here" pdf, inside it has a sample configuration using serovs, and the works.

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

I wish I'd seen this about.... oh, 45 minutes ago.... we just fried our camera, too. Anyone have any solutions (other than the obvious one of ordering a whole new camera)?

Re: WARNING- New camera meets magic smoke
 

Our camera board fried today as well. We talked to innovation first to get an RMA. We can send it back and they can look at it, if they feel that its our fault then we have to pay for them to fix it/replace it. Since just the board shorted anyone know how much the board would cost alone? One of our mentors looked at it and said that he could probably fix it. The problem is that if he cannt fix it we need to RMA it and then we will definatly need to pay for a new one.