anyother robots smoke up?
 

This was seriously the most smoke ive seen come from a robot, anyone else seen this b4?

http://www.savefile.com/files/7141555

sry, this is the quickest way i could upload it, ill make a new link later

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Wow, that was allot of smoke.

Do you know which team that was and what caused it?

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

it was 1189, and i never found out, but i heard that it was a lose screw or something, ud have to ask them

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

:eek: That's impressive! What burned? Last year we had a bad soldeir job on a pwm short, It fused several other pwm cables together and melted our wire wrap but it was nothing like that. I'm going with a short (possibly a motor of victor burning).

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

There was another bad smoker at GLR along with 1189. I don't remember who it was, but they had the fire extinguisher ready.. and it was red. Both smokers had lovely smells...

That was the most magic smoke in awhile.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

One of the teams at Florida regional started to smoke in the middle of the field. I am not exactly sure which team it was. They burnt a fp.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

holy cow! that's like a smokestack! are they renaming their robot?

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I remeber that, but I dont know who it was. I know 47 blew out a drill motor, or so it appeared from all of the magic smoke.

While working on the GTS, another member wanted to test the shooter programing so we simply "unplugged" the pwms to the drive system. We carelessly left them there and didnt move them so when the programmer turned on the robot....poof...lots of magic smoke form the pwm cable that contacted the 12v power to the victor. It comepletey melted the pwm cable...luckily we had some of the Y-pwm cables laying around.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

which motor are you referring to? we didn't have drill motors this year

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Arefin - The team that had the release of magic smoke at UCF was us in Q18. We burnt out two FETS on one of our speed controllers for the drivetrain while pushing two other robots. The ref onsite said he knew the smell and said it had to be the fp, but on return to the pits, I confirmed that it wasn't the FP, I had rewired everything that morning and knew I hadn't connected it that match. It wasn't much magic smoke from the speed controller, but we hit disable before further damage/smoke could occur. Although after this I'm slightly uneasy about the 40amp breakers reliably popping before the speed controller fries...

Video: http://www.techjunkieblog.com/robotics/q18_810smoke.wmv

(As a side note, we had a lot of bad electonic luck in UCF.... We turned on the robot after uncrating it and all of the 5 spikes were dead. They were working perfectly when we shipped...... IFI rep personally tested them and seemed just as confused as us that all 5 were dead and all the other electronics were fine.)

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Last year at nats our battery lit on fire...we never figured out how/why. We think someone may have dropped it at one point...

burned all of the electrical tape, and melted the insulation off about 6 inches of the 6awg leads. Thank god for the brave ref with good reflexes who grabbed the battery and, I kid you not, threw it a good twenty feet.

Thankfully this happened about 2.5 seconds after the match was over.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Sorry, I called the DeWalt motor a drill motor. But I remeber the bottom motor of your shooter puffing out smoke.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

If memory serves me correctly, I seem to remember team 59 (RamTech) smoking a bit after getting on the ramp... no idea what match it was though.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

The worse thing that happened to us this year was a frayed wire in contact with our robot. The entire thing had a current going through it and when a judge touched it he got shocked. Oh well.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I coached that match against them. Sadly, after they reset the field and removed 1189, Huskie forgot to completely reset their robot (thanks to the backup battery) and ended up going nowhere in autonomous instead of scoring all those balls. Not that we did much, as we were still dealing with a lot of other difficulties.

At any rate, I managed to talk with some guys from 1189 on saturday, and related our hard-luck story of losing a match cause an opposing robot went up in smoke. And then discovered that it was them. Apparently some battery leads got twisted up with some PWMs in their turret. Then they either got pinched or otherwise exposed and shorted. And thus full 12V to ground with no breaker. I was honestly wondering how you could possibly make that much smoke without tripping a breaker. I suppose it's good to know that you in fact can't.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

lol, yea, we did forget to reset our bot...our faults...but we did learn that our aim on our camera was off from half field, so we adjusted that after that match :D

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

in who's direction?! where could you possibly throw a burning battery in the middle of a regional?

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

everyone around that robot started to move fast after that happened, anything coulda happened

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Yep, 1189 showed us their video in Pit Admin - and then showed off the burned up length of PWM.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Wow, last year at St. Louis regional.. there was a bot that had some pretty nice smoke coming out of it. Never knew what caused it though.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

It was Nationals- they grabbed it, ran about ten feet, and pitched it into an unoccupied portion of the georgia dome floor. It promptly went out as the refs severly reprimanded us for having a faulty battery.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

This is what I have been told:
The camera wire somehow shorted out and caused an arc that caught their nylon fabric stuff on fire. The fire went out quickly but it still smoldered inside the electrical box. When they lifted up the cover they released the magic cloud. After they got back to their pits everything was fine and nothing (except the fabric) was damaged. Their camera worked fine.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Our pits were right next to them and they were examining there anderson battery connector. I believe that there connector was lose and the leads started to touch and after a while everyone knows there is the mysterious electrical smoke. When they brought it back to the pits they had to replace a connecter or just pop it back into place. Everyone thing was smoked and chared but i believe they had pretty good luck throughtout the weekend. :)

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

We've smoked 2 of the fisher price motors so far this year, expecting at least one or 2 more before its all over. They're running the roller system full out so anytime we get a jam they tend to overheat fairly quickly, no flames.... but just a smokey burning smell.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I have a request for everyone who views this: Please post your videos in a text format.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Hurray for Magic Smoke. Just kidding, but those of you who did start smoking....you should have covered it up with a casual "Man, the fireworks weren't supposed to start until after we won!" Good luck and try to stay away from future ms. ;)

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Last year at Nat's. a nut fell between our Victor 884s and landed on one of them. Then the nut made a circuit between the two motor out leads.Then the victor released puffs of smoke that the judge noticed and alerted our team. The result was a burned out victor that would only allow the motors to run forward and not back wards. :mad: This incident set us back the whole day.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

The correct expression when an engineer makes a mistake, and something bad happens is "THERE!" (instead of "OOPS!")

as in 'There! That should do it!'

to the tune of America -Simon & Garfunkel

Toss me a speed control
I think theres one in my raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
...

The magic smoke song every EE knows:
to the tune of Smoke on the Water - Deep Purple

Slow talking Walter
The fire engine guy
Slow talking Walt-er
nert nert nert
nert nert NER NERT!
...

^ dont you think every event should have this song queued and ready to play when a robot starts a motor meltdown?

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

This is the electronics team captain from team 1189.

What I believe happened to our robot was that the PWM cable powering the camera was placed very close to the pins that connected the camera to its PCB. Unfortunately for us, there was a lot of heat from the power connection in the area, and our design didn't vent the camera very well. The heat melted the coating on the power PWM to the camera, and the exposed wire shorted on one of the screws that mounted the camera to the backplate. Essentially, the chassis became our ground, and the power load through the wire spiked, burning the whole wire along a 4-foot length. Literally the entire black wire was melted. Honestly, it was hard to determine where the power spike came from, as the cable was damaged badly enough that we couldn't tell much. It's also possible that the cable was pinched in a corner of our battery box, and touched one of the terminals, but I would think that would leave one, heavily damaged area, which I didn't find. The damage was well-spread over the entirety of the cable.

Fortunately, the cable couldn't have burned very long; no more than two or three seconds, but the plastic did smolder for along time afterward, and the smell was very potent. Our camera PCB was cracked from the heat, and we had to pull out the cable and replace it, but we've had no problems so far. Other cameras seem to be having similar issues with high heat near power connections. If this can be confirmed, it's definitely something that should be addressed in next year's kit.

Overall, we had a terrible regional, ranking 35th out of 63. Out of six matches, we were only fully operational for four, but I'm happy to say that, aside from the camera, we had literally no electronic faults. Mechanical and programming issues crippled us, but we hope to be up and swinging at the Waterloo Regional in Ontario.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

If this is true, if the camera can get hot enough to melt the end of the PWM wires then it should be verified and guildlines for camera ventilation established.

The insulation melting the whole length of the wire doesnt surprize me. That sounds like there was an over current condtion (in the camera, or a short in the wire near the camera). The same current flows in the whole length of the cable, so if any part of its going to melt, its going to melt over its entire length.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

The only information I have regarding overheating with other team's cameras is pretty vague, and based on sketchy reports, but there was at least one other camera failure at the Great Lakes Regional that I know of. If I'd known about the issues beforehand, I would have tried loading the cables up with power and then monitoring temperatures around the various connections, but I didn't suspect anything like this would happen.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I have personally managed to short 5 volts to ground through one of our cameras for several seconds with no breaker and no magic smoke resulting. And since the power for the camera comes from the 7.2V backup battery, I'm doubting this could've been the source of all the current to burn up a PWM. Perhaps I'll rig up something with an old battery and see how much damage it can do shorted to ground through a PWM. It'd be an odd precedent to set, being the first team to prove we need breakers for servos and the camera.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I think you will find a nicad battery like the backup battery can easily source 10A when shorted

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

That other robot was 857's (see sig). :o Here's what happened:

The battery was (stupidly) only secured inside the robot by three pieces of aluminum extrusion, leaving on side open. During our match, the battery fell out and instead of disconnecting, one of the wires from the battery pulled out of the connector and touched the metal frame. Sometime along the course of the build, a tiny piece of coating was stripped from the ground wire coming from the Fisher Price motor. That touched the frame as well. So now, all the current from the battery was going right to the frame, into the FP motor, completely skipping the whole breaker part (which is why the robot continued to smoke, and then catch fire long after the E-stop button was hit). The fuse in the speed controller blew, but that didn't matter because the battery kept pumping power to the FP motor. The speed controller eventually caught fire, giving off red smoke and prompting Copioli to shout something like, "Holy cow, that's the most magic smoke I've ever seen from a single robot!" ... It was a mess.

At the Wisconsin Regional, check out our super secure battery - now supported on all four side, sand velcroed two different ways, so it can never come off the robot again without some difficulty! :)

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Wow! In addition to the most magic smoke, that's the most coincidental catastrophic failure I've ever heard of! :p

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Remember, electrical tape is your friend, love it, use it, always. It can save yourselves from losing some very expensive components, and is very light.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Last year at the Buckeye Regional, a rookie team, 1532, started smoking during one of their practice matches. It wasn't nearly as much as that, but still.

One of our pit crew members spent the rest of the competition in their pit helping them.

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Yeah there was a lot of magic smoke at GLR... it got to the point (and man was it hilarious) where whenever a robot on the field started smoking up some person would dash over with the fire extinguisher

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

Everytime it happened we put a shower curtain over our robot in the pit afraid that the sprinklers would come on. :) (The shower curtain was a thought for the robot that did not work.) :(

Carolyn Hinckley
Team 1254

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

I know this post was made a while ago, but I would like to let you know...for future reference....that smoke cannot trigger sprinklers, only heat

there is often a small plastic or was rod in the center of a sprinkler, when it melts it opens the valve/ the resulting pressure change then causes the others to open as well

Re: anyother robots smoke up?
 

to all that read my deleted post:
I apologize if I seemed demeaning, degrading, and/or disrespectful. That was not the intent of the post, nor was I trying to convey a harshness towards the specific team member (please know that my post's tone was exactly opposite of what it seemed). Anyhow, I will try to avoid that in the future.

To the topic:

My team's robot this year didn't blow its magical smoke, but we had a battery that blew all of it's, along with several chargers. 3 times it caught fire before we were able to dispose of it properly... :p luckily no permenant damage.