Victor 884 problem

[Mr. Lim]

Originally Posted by Gal Longin

we were driving our robot and all off the sudden , the victor made a weird ticking sound and a spark came out of it and we smelled something burnt.

after we turned off the robot we tried to re-activate the victor it didn't work.
we opened it up and inside we saw two weird things:

1) the big capacitor in the middle of the victor was marked with a big red X sign .
2) on the board inside the victor there was written :" victor 883 rev F" and not victor 884.



does the big X mean it was already bad ? why did the board inside the victor siad victor 883 and not 884? why did the victor overloaded and not the 40amps circuit breaker?

If you happend to be drilling/cutting/removing material from your chassis near the Victors, there's a chance some shavings may have fallen in. That is how I've seen a few Victors release the magic smoke.

It's not a bad idea to blow out your Victors with compressed air before you fire them up.

BTW, most of the time, the X's marked on capacitors are put on by QA people to indicate it was installed in the right direction. So generally, it's a good sign =).

-SlimBoJones...

[patTeam241]

Ok, I guess I'm wrong about the difference between an 884 and an 883, sorry. So, I have no idea what blew it out.

[Josh Hambright]

Although i cant for the life of me at the moment remeber why they switched to 884's instead of 883s (although i do remeber sorting all of our victors out into piles for ones we could use and ones we couldn't) I know that the 883's had a 60A output while the 884's have a 40A output.

I'd say that people are correct in making sure that no metal shavings get inside the victors, there is no easier way to release the magic smoke inside of them then getting metal shavings inside there.

I would recommend contacting IFI about this, they might be able to help you determine if infact it was faulty or if it was just user error that caused the problem.

A word of advice though, make sure if your doing any sort of work with metal around your electronics that you cover them with a cloth or at the least a piece of paper. If at all possible remove the piece of metal or the electronics in the area when working on them. This goes for motors, victors, spikes, anything that uses electrical current, as metal shavings are a deadly force on these.