[Barry Craig]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

Its very easy to do. The capacitor in the middle of the victor is electrolyitic which blows up if you hook the power up backwards or hook the power up to the motor. Its rather quite spectacular. Not to mention the fact that the Mosfets themselves are very fragile to static shocks.

I actually hooked a Victor up backwards last year. When we turned the robot on i heard a "WHRR-CLICK, WHRR-CLICK" noise. Our breakers tripped before any damage was done, so we were lucky. However, this year as a training exercise, we let our rookies take apart last year's bot. One of the rookies used a power drill with a Phillps bit in it and tightened the screws so tight that they broke off at the head. That was bad.