S'mores Anyone?

Note: When working on robots / electronics and you see fire and people start yelling, turn off the power quick, because this is not a good thing.

Yes, tonight we had ourselves a "short". I believe this is a technical term, probably a shortened version of "short-circuit".

We were working quick to test some new code and against my recommendations, the students brought the robot into our programming room with only 30 minutes left in our day. I knew we didn't have enough time to mount the board, connect all the drive motors, test the software, and tear it all apart in the time we had left. Our eager students didn't see it my way and they began feverishly connecting the board to the robot. I wanted to be a team player and not the old fuddy duddy, so I helped hold the control board while the students worked to attach it to the hinges on the robot. Little did we know that someone had already plugged the board into the big battery and the power was live.

Apparently a stray PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) cable, used for carrying signals (not power) crossed paths with our main power cable. Unfortunately, not all of our connections are clean yet and we shorted a small wire with a very large one. This caused the small fire, lots of yelling, some smoke and ended with me killing the power and blowing real hard on some melting wires.

Nothing was damaged, other than some wire (not a big deal). We all learned a good lesson though... next time we'll have some fixens for S'mores with us. :)