Inductive kick is a cruel master...

[ConKbot of Doom]

Well since we didn't use penumatics for any of our robots, we now have 3 years of pneumatics kits. We were going to make a compressor setup just for blowing out our robot in the pits.

Well I rigged up the pressure switch to a spike directly. (12v to the common on the switch, NC to FWD on the spike) Well it worked fine with one compressor, but when someone else decided to hook another up in parallel (20 amps on the spike, 10 amps max on the compressor, should be fine... right)

It was running fine and cycling like it should. But one time it kicked off, and I think I saw an arc between the m+ and m- terminals. There was no arc damage on the connector though. But the next time I tried to power it up, the spike didn't even blink. I was thinking about opening it up, but there was no smoke, so it would just look like normal FETs except they are dead. I guess when the spike kicked off, the inductive "kick" from the two compressors made a rather large and nasty voltage spike.

No big deal, we have bunches of spikes from previous years around, just thought I would share, some of the rules may seem stupid and overly cautious, but they are there for a reason.