Battery connected backwards to robot

[Dale(294engr]]

Originally Posted by dardeshna

So in the rush to get ready for SVR this week, I wired the leads on one of our batteries backwards. I didn't notice and no one else noticed, so when we plugged it in apparently our breaker made a clicking noise and may have tripped at some point. Regardless, it was left plugged in backwards and on for roughly 10 seconds.

The bad part - the damage. Apparently our VRM is shot, our PCM may be nonfunctional, and our PDP only supplies power to certain rails. Is this a problem that someone else has ran into and had to fix? Or are we just out of luck?

Cheers,
Devin Ardeshna (FRC Team 8)

Hi all,

gaving this some thought: one solution will minimize such disaster:

1. simplest is to use a 120A CB that has an internal electromagnetically activated separate coil.. so a diode in series activates on reverse power opens the CB in 50-100 ms.. I've seen these, never used them and currently disallowed part, but perhaps should be?? may be feature in future.. Emergency STOP signal opens 120A CB safely isolating electrical power, solving runaway flaming motor controllers &/or battery

2. Using supplied 120A CB a team could design a motor driven screw to pull/push the red off button down, activated by series diode (on sw'd side CB=auto turn EM sw deactivate, after some inertia for screw to clear top button after disabling CB) screw designed to be well clear for manual pressing, and screw able to me manually returned to "load")

thinking outside the box :-) for infrequent need in 26 years of competition.

in lieu >600A parallel huge diode for tripping >150A

parallel many high current FETs used as series switch , ~.0001 ohm = .1 milliohm turned on if polarity is proper, again not permitted in current rules)