2/14/2014 Day 41: Magic Smoke, Fun Smells, and Catching Fire

Today was a bit of a fun day.  After playing around with the robot and noticing the winch was not working very well, smoke started coming out of the robot, so that halted/severely slowed most robot stuff for most of the day.

Shooter

Today was a good yet bad day to find out something was not properly connected to a motor controller. While it was much better to find out today rather than tomorrow, since it would be Duel in the Desert, we were very shocked to see the smoke today and get a whiff of the result, and had to take it apart and get a backup for Duel in the Desert.  Pretty much, one of the mini-CIMs was disconnected from one port on the motor controller, meaning there was no current going through it, meaning the other mini-CIM was doing all of the work the entire time.  As it was doing much more work than the motor was meant to do, the motor soon overheated, and smoke could be seen rising from the robot, and the strong smell of burnt plastic (to me it smelled oddly like old mashed potatoes and gravy) was smelled when approached.  Since we knew something was overheated, one of the mentors came over to check, and, after checking both motors with the back of his hand, it was pretty obvious one of them was basically gone (since he jumped back, said ow, and told us not to touch the robot for a while).  This pretty much halted any testing today with the shooter, intake, and everything in general.
After taking the gearbox apart, we got to see what the inside of a motor looked like. (badly taken photos below, and yes, it is not supposed to be that color)

Intake

Today we had more struggles with the intake while the robot was still running.  Pretty much, the robot has to be driving at a decent speed now in order for the ball to be sucked up.  I am beginning to now think it is a mix of the tennis balls and the height of the gussets on the front that cause the ball to not go in, as it was much worse today than it was in past days, and today we just installed slightly taller gussets, but, we didn't really get to really test it.

Drive Base

Today not much happened in terms of drive base stuff, as there was the big distraction of the burnt out motor, but the frame did get mounted to the rest of the drive base, and the only thing needed on the bellypan was the pneumatic stuff.