[rescue] Accidentally destroying hardware..

[Sridhar the POWERful]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Bill Bradford wrote:

> > An IBM AS/400 9406.
>
> Story, please.

It was part of a motion control system for a robot.  A *big* robot.  Maybe
40 tons.  I had just written code to add capabilities for some range
finders and thickness sensors we had just added to the robot.  I made a
small mistake setting address jumpers on an RS-485 multidrop sensor
controller.  In short, the robot went berserk, knocked the rack with the
AS/400 into part of the mechanism where the casing was partially crushed
between a gear and a lead screw being driven by a very large three-phase
motor.  The kind of motor that has a flywheel starter.  The controller
subprogram for the motor went into a diagnostics cycle when it detected
that the motor wasn't responding to it's command.  The diagnostics cycle
backed the motor off to do a retry, which released the rack violently,
which rolled towards another moving part which struck the rack, sending it
rolling slowly into the sintering furnace.  I couldn't stop it because it
was too heavy, and I didn't want to be thrown into the furnace myself.  It
was quite spectacular, as you can probably imagine.  It was written off as
a "unforseen conequence" of the test.

Peace...  Sridhar