If you look closely at the charts in the previous post, you’ll notice they end quite abruptly. The picture above shows why.
I have the robot mower configured so the blades only turn on when you hold the rudder stick to the right. The stick is spring loaded, so letting go of it returns it to center, deactivating the blades.
The field I was testing in had several large shrubs in it. One of my goals in the field was to push the envelope on what the mower was capable of cutting through, so I let it mow over several of them in autonomous mode. However, there was a particularly large shrub in the robot’s path, and so I decided to turn the mower blades off by releasing the rudder stick.
As expected, the blades stopped. But the robot stopped moving, too. This was curious: the robot should have continued driving. So I pressed the emergency stop button on the robot to immobilize it, and walked over to the truck where I had Mission Planner running on my laptop.
The Mission Planner screen was frozen as if it wasn’t receiving telemetry from the robot. It took me a few minutes to realize that the issue wasn’t Mission Planner or my laptop radio: it was that the robot wasn’t sending telemetry. And even more curiously, the voltage reading on my SLA batteries said 12.50V. I was worried that I’d really fried my batteries, so I walked back over to the robot to investigate.
Opening the battery bay I found a slight amount of smoke and that awful burnt plastic smell from melted wire insulation. But other than that everything seemed fine. There wasn’t a smoldering fire inside the robot. The batteries weren’t hot to the touch.
At first I chalked it up to too much current running through the wires. The robot uses 120A at peak current, and at those levels even a small amount of resistance could cause the wires to heat up a lot. Perhaps the wires just got hot enough to melt the insulation and came into contact right at the moment I decided to shut the mower blades off?
This just so story didn’t sit well with me. What an awful coincidence that the wires failed at exactly the same moment I was shutting off the motors, especially after the robot ran fine for five minutes prior. Why didn’t they fail earlier?
Additionally, why didn’t the exposed wire conductors fuse together after they came into contact? I’ve heard of people using SLA batteries smaller than mine to spot weld 18650 battery tabs together. The wires were really close together, but weren’t touching when I opened the battery bay. And the wire strands don’t seem to be melted judging from the picture above. Which was extraordinarily lucky, given how bad that could have been.
I did have enough sense to put a 100A fuse on my batteries. It seemed logical that the fuse was what saved my bacon. But using the multimeter to test the fuse revealed that it was not, in fact, blown. At this point I was completely bewildered. I thanked the good Lord that the robot hadn’t turned into a massive lead acid fireball, made sure all my batteries were all disconnected, packed up, and went home.
I’m sure readers are ready to scold me for all of the janky things going on in my battery bay, and I certainly deserve that criticism. My mantra is make it robust, and I definitely did not live up to that standard with my wiring. Below is a full picture of the battery bay.
I have my own list of janky things in here that I intend to fix. What do you see that is janky? Feel free to comment below!
In the next post, I’ll explain what I think went wrong, and the improvements I’m going to make to mitigate the problem and eliminate all the redneck wiring I’ve got going on.
The Mower Project 