So, how my team has let out the magic smoke:
-Fried the ends of alligator clips when a team mate shorted it on a battery
-fried 3 servos, 2 encoder boards when we put 12 volts to them through main breaker panel
-fried a y-cable that was hanging loose and it made contact with a live terminal
thankfully there weren’t any victors, spikes or cameras in there… not sure if the RC is damaged, but still seems functional.
So, what has your team done?
fortunatly no magic smoke this year (knocks on wood). Our team has all the newbies and froshies whipped into shape to not create this wonderful magic smoke.
oh noes teh magic smoke.
We have not released the magic smoke (crosses fingers) this year. Since we pray to the magic smoke gods to make sure it stays in there after it is trapped.
we jump start lasted year robot… yesterday
We got some last Sunday. The electrical guys got a potentiometer soldered up, but they didn’t look at the wiring diagram so we plug it in and the smoke came.
Oh yeah, I inverted the - and + on the IR board, but that just smelled bad(and doesn’t work anymore). Why did they make - the grey wire and + black!!!
we fried a few pwm cables this year.
This is our rookie year and (luckily) there was no magic smoke (yet…)
we had a motor go up in smoke really bad it was like a fog machine went off… that motor on our lifter has burnt about 4 times… i think we should order more victors 
We havent let any smoke out… but we did rip the radio port of the robot controller.
our yellow spike fuse keeps burning out from the compressor… does that count? =]
today on the last day of build my great thinking mentor(who graduated 2 years ago) told me 2 hook the IR board in the wrong way and i fried somithing in it because i switchd the polarity:mad:
now its useless:mad:
No. It’s preventable. That particular fuse and ONLY that fuse can be replaced with a 20A snap-action circuit breaker. I would suggest you replace it before ship.
I believe this is our third or fourth magic-smoke free year in a row. We are very diligent in training our electronics team how not to do things, ad we leave the more accident prone things for the more experienced members or mentors.
Fortunately, no magic smoke. Unfortunately, much ordinary smoke from soldering irons. Although the first time we attempted 2008 OI with 2008 robot (we normally test one at a time with an older, proven functional robot/OI), the OI trim was off a great amount and the joystick ports were switched. I will now choose this moment to mention that I led the OI team. :o
The largest amount of magic smoke we released this year was when a PWM cable came loose from a spike and the negative contacted the positive lead, creating a short through the robot controller and a lot of smoke. Magically, everything but the charred PWM wire was still OK.
Our IR board decided to release its magic smoke, but I packed it back in and it started working:)
Other than that, our bot’s stayed smoke free
the most smoke we let out this year is from our backup battery charger circuit we built we had a solder bridge that fried our zener doide.:ahh:
our first year(2006) we didn’t have any… but the last 2 years we have let out the magic smoke last year it was just a PWM cable and this year it was a victor:ahh: i wasn’t there when they did it… but i here it was bad!!!
we fried an FP motor on our elevator because someone doesn’t understand “no don’t use past years motors and transmissions”
We had our Banebot motor smoke 3 or 4 time when opperating our wrist on the arm. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=64571
Kyle Jordan
624 Cryptonite Robotics