Battery Smoke

[Mike Hendricks]

Another thing to mention, inspectors can't always catch everything. While they see the robot at the beginning of the weekend, much can happen between Thursday and Saturday. I saw many exposed electrical connections when doing rechecks on Saturday in Curie, but also saw a lot on Thursday doing the initial inspections.

We have kicked students off of our team before for intentionally shorting batteries out (during build season, they never had the chance to make it to competition). One thing I did notice (which is a rather large pet peeve of mine), is the number of people in Atlanta (and any competition in general), that carry the battery around by the Anderson connector. Now, if you have properly crimped and soldered lugs (NOT screw on terminals), this isn't as serious .. but very few teams actually crimp lugs onto the battery cables. Depending on your insulation job, this could cause the terminals to become exposed, and short out your frame. Sadly, for most teams (including ours) the battery is one of the last things to get mounted on the robot, and usually ends up in a bad place.

Please, enlighten others on your team about proper mounting, wiring, and carrying methods for the batteries. While there has never been an incident (that I've heard of) where one of these batteries have exploded .. I'm not going to say it won't happen. Nothing worse than a robot covered in lead and acid to ruin your weekend (although, I suppose an arena of people and multiple robots covered in lead and acid could be worse).