[Jay Lundy]

We had a pretty bad problem with batteries on our robot this year. The low battery light would always turn on after only about 2 minutes of using a fully charged battery, and we could never turn in high gear because the battery couldn't handle it. Our problem went unsolved until midday on friday when we realized (after I got shocked several times by touching the robot) that our frame was part of the robot's circuit. It took up about an hour of checking connections before we finally realized that a screw in the drill motor was too long and it was touching the drill motor electrical connection. The screw tranfered the charge to the outer casing of the drill motor which tranferred the charge over the frame. After we solved that problem we didn't have any more battery problems. We used the same battery every qualifying match after that and it never got low.