Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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:

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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...

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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 ;)

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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.

Re: Who has released the Magic Smoke!!!
 

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...