FTC- preventing ESD

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by pyroslev

Your wheels/treads are sliding along on the tiles, the same way your socks slide along on carpet. This builds up a charge. Said charge is transferred into the frame through the metal drive shafts. The frame acts as a Leyden Jar/Baghdad Battery. The charge is not relatively high to the human touch but to electronics it is.

Does static conduct through plastic or rubber? Because I'm pretty (Again, I fully admit that I know very little about electricity) sure those are both insulators, and almost all robot wheels are made out of those two materials.

That said, the only time we got shocked this year was when we had frame-to-frame contact with another robot, so the material in our wheels might not have even mattered. I'm just trying to understand the phenomenon here.

Originally Posted by pyroslev

The back of the motor controller has 4 metal screwheads. These when in contact with the frame are a direct line for that charge. (The Matrix Controller's screwheads are recessed almost a half inch)

DUH! I didn't realize those screwheads could be an electrical path into the controller. That solves my "How does the charge get into the electronics" problem.

Is there any chance that the static charge could also be carried through the motor leads into the controller?