Have you ever had flames on your robot? (Real or graphical?)

[Cory]

Team 691 "Hartburn" (Hahaha, get it? ) caught fire at the 2002(?) SoCal Regional.

[thoughtful]

As a matter of fact we had real flames on the robot, its actually an interesting story. Last year we were all testing the robot at around 10:00 pm at night, i was driving the robot, we started smelling something funny, but discarded the smell as motors heating up. Any ways after abotu 10 second we saw flames, but some fast thinking member who were standing near the bot turned the break off, it was a faulty vector, no damage to anyother components was done, and now we often joke about it. Now we check all our components on a test board first.

[Heretic121]

Team 121's bot in Arch - seminfinal match 1.1 our bot was *im not sure if it sparked* but it definatley had heavy smoke which you could smell for the complete other side of the field =/

also i belive the side flaps of the 2003 bot had flames

[Hunter]

Our robot sort of had real flames on it last year (more of an explosion). We hooked up the current sensors supplied in the kit last year, and because of the intense heat required to get a connection on them, it melted the shielding on our pwm cable that attached to it. This caused a short across the polartiy sensitive capacitor and it created an awsome explosion in our electronics compartment. It turned everything down there black and we had to wipe it off, this was the first time we turned on our robot and it scared us to death, until we looked inside and saw that it didn't really do much serious damage (we ended up not using the current sensors).

[Adam Krajewski]

We (857) had some real flames on our robot back in 2002 while on in competition at the West Michigan Regional.

A non-electrical mentor put one of our old batteries (which I don't even know why we had it with us) on the robot without anyone noticing. He also installed it upside-down AND neglected to strap it down.

We hit a robot during the match, the battery popped up, and both contacts hit our aluminum chassis. The little electrical tape that was dangling from the connector caught on fire with dramatic foot-tall flames. Luckily, vinyl electrical tape doesn't burn well, and the flames quickly went out without the need of a fire extinguisher. The robot was disabled by the field judges out of concern over safety, but once back to the pit we found the damage was minimal (just a little soot).

I realized what happened, took off the battery and was shocked to see that the THREADS of the bolts holding the battery cables to the terminals were MELTED. I cut off the battery cables so that mistake couldn't be made again.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Cyberblue had some cool blue flames going on the side of our drive this year. They were this kind of really durable sticker thing that held up pretty much all through IRI with only minor scratches & holes.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

Yup, in 2001

[NotaNerd]

It was the first match of the year last year when we ran our robot waaaaaay to hard and the motors completely blew out. The whole VCU arena was filled with smoke and the oh so pleasant smell of burning plastic.

[Matt Attallah]

Nope.

Due to my "Drive it like you stole it" in 2003 - I had a VIN number on the robot scratched out though...

[Kyle Love]

As far as I know, we have never had flames. We did, however, get a victor going a bit too fast and burnt it up pretty good. It was at MWR or Nats I forget. It looked awesome though. It wasn't really on fire but there were sparks.

[Billfred]

No flames yet. (Then again, Bob has eight matches on him, running window motors. Flames aren't too likely, if you ask me.)

Meanwhile, I wouldn't mind giving Occam's Razor (1293's next foray into FIRST) a nifty paint job. Or keeping the super-fly electrical tape numbers.

[Lindsey]

No flames real or graphics, but a funny story:

I 2002 we had some fun and put a fog machine on our cart. The guys who made the cart put a bit of time into it and the fog was routed out a bunch of small holes on the top side of the cart, where the robot sat. While waiting by the side of the field for our the match ahead of us to finish up, we turned up the fog on the cart, everyone on the team knew what was going on and the drive team was nonchalantly watching the match, but the field officials were not so comfortable with the large plume of fog rising from our robot, thinking back it did look a lot like smoke, one of the officials came up to the drivers with a fairly large fire extinguisher and asked if we needed it!

Lindsey

[Zzyzx]

Our team had some smoke erupting from our robots quite a few times during the FIRST competitions. We also had a flamethower on our robot that competed in Steel Conflict last year. It is quite amazing what can be done with an old camping stove you picked up for $15 bucks at a garage sale.