[RyanN]

I must agree with Al on this... it's a great photo of what can happen with a bad connection. Although I've never had an issue with it, I will tell our electrical team to fold over the wire upon pushing it into the maxi-fuse block. I've done this before with other connections, but I've always considered it trashy to do this, so I've never done this with our 6AWG wire. I've done it before with the small muffin fan wires to the little red ring connectors when they were just too big, then they kept on pulling out, so I soldered the wires one, and haven't had too much trouble since then. I'm not at all surprised that the copper melted with so much of a load at such a weak point. I'm sorry this happened to you, but take it as a learning experience that I'm sure you'll never forget, and will make sure that next year this will not happen.

For preventative maintenance, at the beginning of any regional/championship, and before the finals, I reinspect my electrical and make sure everything is all tight, nothing is chaffed, and that nothing in my control will go wrong.

Some preventative measures I have taken with our robot:
All PWM cables are held in with a small dab of hot glue. Hot glue works well for this, and easily comes off if I want it to. All the PWM wires that go to the controller are also hot glued in place.

Solder fan wires, and solder in the 40AMP ring connectors to the wire. (Unfortunately I didn't do this this year, but I still may, but it will have to be with lead free solder. I have never soldered with lead free solder before, so hopefully it won't be a bad experience)

Label EVERYTHING!!! It makes fixing something so much easier. Every victor, spike, circuit breaker, pwm cable, etc... is labeled.




Al, this is a question for you... I placed a label on top of our circuit breakers since the BUSS fuse block is hard to label. I did put a label on the long ways that says that all circuit breakers are 20AMP's... will an inspector ask me to verify that all breakers are 20AMP's? Should I put some temporary circuit breakers in for inspection? Is this fine? I don't remember anything in the rules about being able to read all the circuit breakers. <R50> states that "Circuit breakers must be accessible for inspection at each FIRST Robotics Competition
event." The breakers are accessible by opening our hood, and an inspector can easily see that these are the snap action breakers by the shape and the colors of the legs of the breakers. Will they take my word that they are all 20AMP, not that they all are required to be 20AMP, just the RC, and 3 spikes. Since you're an inspector, I wanted your input on this.