Mystery Power Expander Burn

[QuantumSacrosanct]

Hi,

We recently burnt out our power expander. We don’t exactly know what the reasoning is behind this. We had 6 motors from the arm connected to the power expander (we use two y-cables, and two non y-cabled motor controllers going into the power expander), and 6 motors from the base (and claw) connected directly into the cortex. We had one battery plugged into the power expander and one battery plugged into the cortex itself.

We were raising the arm when one of us shouted that they smell something burning. We stopped the arm (it didn’t stop on its own) and we turned off the cortex. We felt, and smelled around until we found the source. The power expander was extremely warm, and there was a strong smell coming from it. We unscrewed the power expander and saw that a small part of the internal hardware was black.

We weren’t able to figure out why that happened though. We want to know so that we don’t end up burning any more power expanders. We got a new power expander fyi.

Thanks,
-10X

[VEX_Support]

Hello Team 10X,

Thank you for the detailed description of the problem.
This might happen if there is a direct short in your system. Usually the source of the problem is damaged or receding insulation in one of the motors or extension cables, example attached.

Please do a visual inspection on all of your wiring and look for exposed copper.
Regards.