Scott, AKA UTlinebacker
First it is note worthy that at my work place one of our most respected engineers played Football for WSU. Instead of pursuing a career in sports he is a civil engineer with his PE... Who happens to be overseeing the construction of two of the worlds largest reinforced concrete water reservoirs.
Thanks for the details I had overlooked the failure report. Out teams only Jag failure was from human error. V+ and V- reversed. This blew copper all over the board and one way or another took out the 5v regulator and U6. the FETs appear to have survived just fine . The Victor that suffered the same fate in 08 didn't fare as well, It lost 6/12ths of its FETs.
In my experience human error is one of the most common reasons for failure. Usually we (our team) does a lot of color coding and labeling to try to prevent errors from "heat of the moment" maintenance. In this case the coach didn't have someone else check his work prior to power up.
The Red and Black screws for V+ and V- are a good example of simple things that can be done to help prevent errors. Taking this one step farther; No matter what color the package is the raised lettering can be difficult to read when put in a robot. We use a
paint pen smeared across the jumper labels to highlight the lettering. I could really dig some more TI red on the raised lettering!
Finally for our team the Jag linearity improves drivability and that trumps all other considerations such as: form factor, cost and even reliability.
And by the way we really appreciated the Luminary Micro guy coming to Portland last year.
Thanks