We Need Help!!!!!!!

[archiver]

Posted by Travis Covington.

Student on team #115, MV ROBOTICS, from Monta Vista High School and Hitachi Data Systems - 3com - NASA Ames.

Posted on 4/2/2000 10:55 AM MST



Hello everyone!

Ca regional went well. Alot of teams are really good.
Look out for teams 330, 60, and 64. Oh and 115 if I
can get some help with this problem we are having.

This is the problem. During practice rounds we were
driving around picking up balls without a hitch.
Everything worked great. But when we were in our
second qualifying match the left side of our drivetrain
just would not work. It would act as though the fuse
went. After a few seconds it would work again but it
never worked the whole match, it just got worse. This
happened the rest of competition and randomly we were
still ranked 12th.

So, we replaced everything...speed controller, new
drill motor, switched the connection on the fuse panel,
realined the chains, lubed chains, and everything else
we could think of...even changing the gear ratio. None
of these things helped at all.

we found out that it was drawing about 10 to 15 more
amps than the right side. But after we switched
everything AGAIN it was the same, it drew the same
current, until of course we went out on the field where
it didnt work after about 30 seconds.

During this whole process we were taking advice from
practically every enginner from other teams as well as
a couple of crew people from FIRST. None of them had a
solution. They had ideas which we tried, but nothing
worked.

Strangest of all things...we went outside after we had
frozen up in our first final match, and it worked with
no problems. We drove it around for 5 to 10 min.
Nothing went wrong.

I am wondering if the control box could be bad. I mean
something like the competition port. I was also
wondering if a bad fuse panel could cause this.

Any ideas??

Thank you, and look out for us in Fla. (if we fix this
prob.)

Travis Covingt