Last week, I had to make a large decision. Our cortex had the risk of smoking due to a bad motor controller, and it had sent a different cortex smoking minutes earlier. I decided to test every motor to make sure that the cortex would not be destroyed, and not show for a match.
Would you risk frying a cortex to win:
a qualification match?
an elimination match?
a final?
a worlds match?
a worlds final?
No.
Probably not
Depends on the tournament and how important it is
Depends on how our rank is looking at the moment
For sure.
did u get the issue figured out? :0
well, better losing a match than having ur cortex explode mid match 
When we tested each motor, we found that one of the motor controllers was bad and probably caused the cortex to smoke. We replaced it, tested the operation of the cortex with the cover off to make sure that it would not smoke and then put it all back together. We did average the rest of the day, but won the design award.
If smoke started coming out during a match, I would have ran onto the field to try to save the cortex.
not for anything under an elimination. of course, my school can afford to replace cortexes and we dont have to pay for them ourselves. If you paid for your own cortex, i would save it immediately.
Are you sure the cortex was smoking? We had a similar experience (bad motor controller, smoke billowing from the robot). It turned out that the cortex was undamaged; all of the smoke had come from the motor controller, which was directly below our cortex, which made it look like we had fried the cortex when we really hadn’t, and the assumption that we had to replace the cortex cost us an easy qualification match.
I would still not risk the cortex for a qualification match at a tournament like that one (especially since I was still able to sell us to the 2nd seed as a first pick and make the finals). I would agree with what Wallaby said, although I would probably risk more in the deciding match of a final round, since our mentor is on first-name basis with the cortex repair guy at VEX and MSU has extras that we can borrow while ours is being repaired.
Our cjortex started smoking at the competition last week as well…
Precisely how did the motor/cortex go bad? I haven’t encountered any other teams (in person) that have had the same issue. With my club of nine teams we run skirmishes quite often but I have never seen one of our cortexes smoke
Our cortex smoked also!! And we thought we were the only ones! We had to replace the cortex, our fried a to a, and our laptop the day before states!!
What were you doing to your robot with a computer plugged into it? Driving, programming, or some thing else?