broken jumper on controller

[Mike Soukup]

Yesterday an out of control driver (me) drove our practice base into the 2001 goals and broke the jumper that switches between the default/user program. I'm assuming other teams ran into similar issues, so what's the solution? Permanently selecting the user program is good enough for us. We need this fixed by Monday evening because we're using it in class to teach our students about the software on the robot. Thanks for any advice or help.

Mike

[patrickrd]

Originally posted by Mike Soukup
Yesterday an out of control driver (me) drove our practice base into the 2001 goals and broke the jumper that switches between the default/user program. I'm assuming other teams ran into similar issues, so what's the solution? Permanently selecting the user program is good enough for us. We need this fixed by Monday evening because we're using it in class to teach our students about the software on the robot. Thanks for any advice or help.

Mike

What are you doing not covering up your electronics!!!

I think the jumpers on there are standard jumpers... the same size that are used in computers. You can likely buy them from any computer repair place or you can open up your system and yank one from the back your hard drive or cd rom (although I warn these devices may or may not continue to work). If the actual pins broke that the jumper connects to, you have a bigger problem... If that's the case I'd recommend (but really advise against) sauldering a small wire between the places the two jumpers used to be, but that might heat up some internal components to such an extent that you might permanantly damage the robot controller. I wonder if there is a default setting if you take off the jumper entirely?

Patrick

[nwagers]

Being on team 111, don't you have previous controllers? I do believe that you can ship it to Innovation FIRST for repairs, but don't expect it by Monday.

[Mike Soukup]

I know Pat, we need a lecture on covering our electronics. This is a practice bot that we slapped together quickly without bothering to but shields on (but we'll add them now). And yes, the pins broke, not the little jumper. Monday morning our electrical guy sauldered together the two pins that select the user code, and everything works fine. Another electrical guy on our team says he can replace the actual pins, so we'll look into that. The default setting when you completely remove the jumper is to do nothing

I think our team has 4 robot controllers, 3 on previous year's robots and 1 on our practice base. We didn't want to mess with the old bots to fix the practice bot.

[Jeff Waegelin]

Funny that you say this. Just last Thursday, we ran into a similar problem. We were doing a demo at school conferences (shamelessly asking for money), and we ran into a problem. Our robot had been reprogrammed, and the new program was giving us trouble. We decided to switch back to the default, and when a teammember pulled the jumper, he lost it. We spent 20 minutes looking, and couldn't find it. How did we fix it? With a paperclip. All we did was bend a piece of the paperclip around the pins, and we were set. Office supplies may not be the best solution, but it works.

[Dan 550]

I believe that there was a spare jumper in the fine electronics bag this year, but don't hold me to that...