[archiver]

Posted by James Jones.

Engineer on team #267, The Demolition Squad, from North Broward & St Andrews and Motorola.

Posted on 7/5/2000 11:19 AM MST


In Reply to: 60 amp fuse problems... posted by Joe Johnson on 6/30/2000 7:33 PM MST:



Joe, your killing me. If you have a way of increasing the capacity of that fuse and you plan on sharing it with us later why not share it now? Anecdotaly (sp?) I think the fuses degrade with severe use over time so we started replacing them every round and that seemed to help although the people manning the spare parts booth gave us dirty looks.

Just a few comments on this discussion as well.

We used 2 drills and 2 FP's for the drive system this year and had fuse problems. Since the problems don't generally show up until your robot is fully loaded with all its parts and the students are driving aggresively many teams are not going to find out they have a fuse problem until right before the robot ships or at competition. If the only way to fix the problem is a gear ratio change, many teams are going to be stuck because they won't have the time or resources to do this.

Even if you allow 2 fuses, 4 drills can suck the system voltage down so low that the controller starts acting up, so now you need 2 batteries and a higher weight limit.

My opinion is that the robots are fast enough. We were 10 ft/sec at 127 lbs and if we hit another robot hard pieces tended to fly (you should'a had bumpers). Some people thought that we were just out to destroy people but that was not the design intent of the robot, it was the speed. If the robots get even faster I think there is going to be serious carnage on the field. The other thing that makes me nervous about faster robots is debug and practice sessions as well as demos where people may be near a running robot. If our robot hit somebody hard it could very easily break an ankle. I think the robots are fast enough.

That said, we're planning on being faster next year :~)