Could a magnetic field around CIMs cause fuses to blow?
After testing our drive train for the first time we noticed some strange behavior from one of the CIMs and the Victor controlling it. We are using the gearboxes and the CIMs from the KOP.
When we started testing our motors we noticed that whenever we tried to turn a fuse would blow for one of the motors in the gearbox on the left side of our robot and the right side would begin to struggle. This happend wether the robot was on the ground not. We decided that we should isolate the problem by testing one side of the robot at a time, so we pulled out the fuses for the gearbox on the left side. When we drove the motors on right side we noticed that the cooling fan on the Victor of the motor that had been blowing fuses began to spin, and the Victor's LED came on. This seemed very odd because the cooling fan only came on when we drove the rightside motors. I noticed that the black wire for this "problem motor" was running directly under one of the motors on the rightside. I began to wonder if the magnetic field generated by the aperture of CIM could be powerful enough to induce a current in this cable. If so this would explain where the power was coming from to power the fan on the Victor. Could this also explain why this motor was blowing fuses? Jay(a team mate) and I speculate that the magnetic field around the CIMs could have caused a large amount of resistance in the problem motor's cables whenever we tried to turn. Does this explain our problem? Are we crazy?
P.S. We tried to reproduce the situation and use a multi-meter to measure the voltage produced but failed to get any definative results. I think a science teacher at my school has some sort of meter(EMF meter I think) for measuring the strength of magnetic fields so we should have some measurements by monday. Also here are some pics of our gearboxes and the wiring to them.
Picture of the wiring
Picture of the motors