How fast have you broken stuff?

[daltore]

One of our more head-in-the-clouds members decided the positive-to-negative rule of series connections worked for putting power cables on batteries too, so we ended up with a backward battery plug that no one noticed before plugging it into the wireless router so the OI would be portable. I'm so glad we had the foresight to just plug it into the router instead of the DS. The router blew, so we opened it up and fortunately it was just a 0-ohm resister that we could solder over and fix the problem. That was 4 days after kick-off.

Last year's robot, we had 6 Victors. By the end of the season, we'd bought 6 replacements, but only for 4 of them. We had (6) 4" wheels going 1200 RPM with wedge-top tread. When consulting the table that says how likely you are to blow a motor controller, we realized we were off the chart. We also ran through a set of IFI traction wheels, 3 sets of treads, 4 sprockets, a forklift fork, and have 4 SLA batteries that are on their last chemical reactions from that one build season.

After last year, we've decided to use the ToughBoxes, #35 chain, bulk belting, robones lexan, the new Banebots gearboxes, we're prototyping everything, and putting structural reinforcement on every single part of the robot that has any chance of being exposed to stress so we either won't break anything, or it'll be cheap to fix.