The 3 W's by Technopro

Smoke's the last thing you want to see coming from your robot that you worked for quite a while on. When you see it, your brain goes into "Oh no, save it!" mode.

You get a rush of adrenaline as your beast starts to eat away at itself, sparks illuminating that toxic smoke. You become frantic, grabbing what ever you can, tearing it out of the body, with the hope it isn't dead already. You jump for the battery, the source of its strength, and break it away from the chaos that is your hard work. It then all settles.

The smoke, still lingering in the air, chokes you as you pick at the remains, wondering "What went wrong?". You start to sort out your mistakes, often finding more than one. Then you find the big one. The simple yet so destructive cause of the event. You pity yourself, for you may have just added weeks of work to your goal. You finish damage control, and go to make sure the guts you removed, though scared physically, still work. The ones you find do work, add to your excitement, and the damaged to your disappointment.

In the end, your simple mistake, the one little wire, cost you some, gave you some, and taught you many things. Its that lesson you learned that gives you the power to move forward. Though your bound to make another mistake like such, you continue. Its the surprise, the problems to solve, the creativity of robotics, that power you in. And it's that that makes you love robotics.

Hope you guys enjoyed the writing above. Was bored and needed to wind down after the afternoon I've had.

I write this after making a critical error in my Alex robot while testing the drive train. I have to explain the setup to make you understand.

I had an l298n with the ez-b v4 wired up to it. the l298 recieved power straight from the 12v sla battery I had. The ez-b was regulated by a 5amp adjustable power supply. I had the prongs of the multimeter in the screw ports of the l298 power slots. This was so I could read the voltage of the battery. The battery clipped onto the exposed part of the prongs thus supplying the l298n power through alligator clip leads.

Was I didn't mention was my motors were wired wrong. I had put red and blue together in the left setup, and brown and black in the right setup. It should have been red and black with brown and blue. This stopped the motors from functioning properly.

While failing to get the bot to move due to this error, I unplugged the lead from the multimeter thinking it may be shorting something. To no avail, I plugged it back in. Unfortunately, I plugged it into the 10A port instead of the voltage port. That's when I saw the L298 go really dim. I jumped at the power lead to unplug it, but the alligator lead from the battery was already burning away. I ripped out the other lead to open the circuit, and was lucky as the wire didn't burn through other wires in the nest of my robots setup. This is the wire:

This is the wire it began to burn.

This thread could be informative for newbies by giving them many tips from people who already made mistakes, so they don't make the same ones, while giving some comic material for us more experienced people.

So, I want to here your stories of mistakes you've made.! This community isn't very judgmental so why not?

Thanks for reading, And don't forget to post your favourite mistake you've made!

Tech