So in my haste of moving things around today, I managed to leave the robot in the back of a pickup truck parked on the roof of a parking garage. A torrential summer downpour later, the entire thing was soaking wet.
The team spent about three hours drying everything with towels and a hair dryer. To my utter surprise, it worked fine after that. No water had gotten into the OI, RC, or radios, and what water had gotten into the relays and speed controllers seemed not to matter. (I’ve taken them apart and there is a coating on everything that I think helped a lot.)
Anyway, just thought I’d share. In light of the announcement of a new control system, this was a fortunate reminder of the durability of the IFI setup and I hope the new system can stand up to abuse as well.
This has happened to us before, somewhat. We were transporting our 2006 (?) robot from an event and it started raining. The robot had a plastic covering over the top of it, thankfully. Although, I honestly wouldn’t be phased if that robot was harmed in anyway.
Our 2004 robot was in a parade in 2005 when it started to rain halfway through. And ironically the electronics fared much better than the mechanisms. Whereas the steel gears in the transmissions did not take very nicely to the water, the entire IFI control system was fine. In fact, that same control system was recently used on our Mountain Dewbot, which was designed to drive through snow.
With many electronics, if you dry them completely before turning them on (after they decided to become close friends with dihydrogen monoxide) they’ll be fine. But what surprises me is that our 2004 robot was on during the parade when it was raining.
This brings back memories of IRI 2005, and the downpour that drenched our robot. Even though we had a tarp covering it, the tarp had developed holes during the drive. The next morning, we had almost an inch of standing water in the base of our bot, and “tarp dust” everywhere. After a few hours of paper towels, blow driers, heat guns, and WD40, the robot was back in working order. The worst electrical problem was a blown fuse (although the robot was never quite the same).
Back in 2002, there were very different shipping requirements. In particular, no crate was required, just attaching the robot to a pallet was sufficient. When we shipped our robot at the end of the build period, this is how we shipped it. We were in Seattle, and going to the Seattle regional. When we got to the regional several weeks later, we learned that the robots had been stored outside (not in a warehouse as we had believed). Our robot had an inch or more of standing water in the bottom, and the wood we’d used as ball guides was completely warped. The RC required replacement; the gears required a severe treatment of WD-40; the motors required replacement; the wood guides required being recut.
The following year we built a crate which could almost have been submerged and would still protect the robot, and we haven’t used wood on the robot since.
We took our robot to a team member’s house to work when we weren’t allowed in the school building on a snow day this year. We had to carry it through the snow to the back door and someone ran into a snow-covered bush. The whole thing was damp, so we put it next to a space heater and let it dry before we turned it on. Everything was fine.
