Crazy Inspection Stories

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally posted by robohyo
The worst part is our inspector at championship. Made us change 3 of our 30 Amps to 20 Amps. 2 for van door motors and 1 for our light. At regional, the trained the inspectors using our robot.

Are you implying that the inspectors made you change those breakers when they shouldn't have? I worked as an inspector at the Championship and made several teams change out 30A breakers for 20A (I don't think I inspected you though as I didn't ask anyone to swap 30 for 20 for van door motors as the max for those is 30A). There is a good reason for this - devices like the light are allowed to be connected with smaller gauge wire. When making an electrical circuit, you want the breaker to be the weak link in the system - so that it will fail first. If you have a very large breaker in series with very small gauge wire, the wire will get hot and possibly melt before the breaker flinches. Instead you want the breaker to trip before the wire gets hot. Even the rule book states, "The circuit breaker current ratings indicated for specific circuits are the maximum allowed, and the AWG wire sizes are the minimum allowed."

As an inspector, I'd say that 1/4 to 1/3 of the teams I inspected had fairly major rules violations. Every time I pointed these out, the team would argue with me, saying "But we passed at the regionals!" It was clear to me that inspections at certain regionals were very, very lax. Please people, in the future, don't bother with the "We passed at a regional!" speech. Each event is a new competition and your robot has to pass inspection at each.

I think that the sheer number of problems we found at the Championship that should have been caught at the regionals was disturbing, and I think the FIRST staff working at the inspection area took note. I'd expect some changes next year in the inspection process.