Re: Catastrophe...
 

This thread is making me all vaklempt. :) This is FIRST at its best! Advice, offers for spare parts, and even lunch! You all ROCK! :D

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Just dawned on me-

Thank god no one was hurt.

Our school had a gas leak last year during the season. Finally managed to get the school evac'd and people were standing around in front of gas-filled brick buildings whining that they wanted back in. It took several stern comments and lectures to parents to police their children to get them to move back to the recommended 250 foot distance. I even took teachers to task during the process as they (and the students) are drilled to cross the entire parking lot to the far end for a fire.

One woman was crying that her keys were stuck in her coat inside and she just had to get home- so I offered to drive her- at which point she was afraid someone would steal her coat and purse.

Gas explosions are nasty. Fires are nasty. Freezing water is nasty too, but I am very much relieved that everyone on your team is Safe and Sound (save for a nasty head cold).

Hopefully I can cheer you up with this:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=10299

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Ok, Nike dropped by to check out our "robot" and they told us they had a vacuum oven. They can heat anything to a certain temperature and vacuum the humidity/water down to "0.001 percent". So we gave them all of the stuff to take while we wait on IFI to supply. They should have it overnight and it should be good. The machine is meant for plastics too.. so it shouldn't melt it.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

What a bad time to have something like that happen!

Your electronics should be fine as long as they are dry when you use them the next time. I'd be more worried about rusting of metal parts, especially motors...

I hope everything turns out good for you guys, best of luck!

Re: Catastrophe...
 

At the post season river rage event last year, we drove up in the pouring rain with a second robot in an open pickup truck.

We put the battery on it and tried getting it running for maybe 10 minutes checking this and that, blowing out here or there.

I was thinking that there might be water on the connectors of the FRC (understatement of the century) and we should bring it to the hand dryer in the bathroom to dry it off. As I was handing it off to be dried I could distinctly hear water sloshing around inside the thing. We unscrewed the screws on the back of the unit and water poured out of the unit. It was literally filled to the top with water. We dried it off and it worked but the spikes didn't.

Checking the spikes, they were also filled to the top with water.

The 884's seemed to self drain.

After draining, everything worked fine and does to this day. We did have trouble getting some rusted gears off motors a few months later.

It seems the IFI boards and components are fairly robust.

While bad, I wouldn't sweat the water too much and as mentioned above at least no one was hurt and you have a great F.I.R.S.T. story.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Hey One of my team's mentor, said FIRST was replacing all your parts. Is this true? Or is it just a rumor

Re: Catastrophe...
 

This is true. Not quite all of them, but we gave them a list of things.. such as victors, camera assembly, some motors we may use, etc. They are very nice people! It should be shipping tomorow or monday... And yes, our OI was filled with water and u could hear it sloshing too. In the meantime, the vacuum dryer did work, the components are waterless and not broken from what we have checked. We did a quick test run and so far it is all doing what is suppose to. The motors as well as breaker panels are rusted and the spikes/victors are pretty dirty. When our new shipment arrives we will be replacing everything and just using our current parts for programming testing. From what I know, Victors are definatly not the most reliable part in the kit. We had quite a bit fail in the past while at the competition.

PS The picture of the pipe the next day is here :)

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Ah, there is just something I love about the FIRST community. Everyone pulling together to get the team with the bad luck new parts, and everything. While I am not in FIRST robotics anymore, I still feel that I am part of the community, and it put a smile to my face that so many different teams that only have one thing in common (Robotics) come together and try to help others out.

Just one other note, Alcohol is a bad idea, it will eat the traces on the board. I had poured water on my keyboard by accident when I dropped a glass, I had also heard about the alcohol, poured it over, and washed it out properly, and the keyboard was dead. Opened it up, and found that all the traces were missing, or at least most of them.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...5?OpenDocument Great story! It appeared on my Google alert.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Here's video from our local TV station:
http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_articl...storyid=112005

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Not to get too far off topic, but I was thinking of a story that was kind of funny. Call my old team (151) crazy, but in the 2001 UTC Reginal we found out we had a nagging leak in our pneumatic system. So what did we do? Well that year we had all of our electronics mounted to the superstructure of our robot, and just the pneumatics (minus the solenoids) in the "tub" of our chassis. So we filled the entire "tub" of our robot with water and used that to check for our leaks, turned out we had used a "tee" fitting with no plug so the air was just escaping, but you should've seen the looks on peoples faces when we were pouring buckets of water in the robot.

Back to the topic at hand, If you find out you've got rusty parts (gears, sprockets) from the water, immerse the parts in a tub of coke (yes, aside from mythbusters I've done this) and let them marinate for about an hour or so. The soda will dissolve the rust, and clean the metal. HOWEVER the parts will be extremely sticky, so after the rust is removed immerse the parts again in isopropyl alcohol to clean them.

I hope you guys succeed from this disaster! You've got my support!

~Greg

Re: Catastrophe...
 

thanks for all the replies it all helps ease the pain. fortunatly first is replacing all of our electronics that were ruined in the flood. but i think we are back on our feet for now, we just finished and attatched part of our arm so unless there is a jet fuel fire in our closet we should be "ok".

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Felix,
It pains me to jump in on this one but there are a lot of water damage stories in electronics. Pure, distilled water can be relied on to not cause damage to components but any other water, especially water that has been in an iron pipe for any length of time, will be a gift that keeps on giving. Water does not conduct electricity it is the contaminents that conduct and cause harm.
Sorry guys.

X,
Alchohol does not eat traces, but in a keyboard there are other things that make it bad. The water will be pulled between electrical layers by capillary action. Many keyboards use a rubber and carbon pad to connect two pads on the keyboard plane. (rows and columns) Spilling water, not only conducts electric current into the sensitive keyboard encoder, it also changes the electrical property of the carbon. If the keyboard doesn't die completely, you might find that a row or column will cease working. (i.e. the 2,w,s,x, and alt key might not work but everything else will.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

Yes we did show up on the news and in the paper.. I had a chance to get interviewed and chose not to :).

I think we will pull out of this.. Everything should go as planned, just set behind, and we need to put in extra hours in the next few weeks.

Re: Catastrophe...
 

The reason the IFI stuff may be OK (especially the Victors and Spikes) is that the boards are conformally coated, which would prevent water from contacting metal parts and causing shorts. However, I do not believe the RC is coated.