EE for a day

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

If you had to guess... what's the worst thing that could break on the car right before competition? Something that's impossible to repair, impossible to replace, outrageously expensive, reliable for several years of use, and absolutely critical for the car to drive... Something that everybody on our team has joked about when writing code... "well, if that broke we'd be up a creek for everything else anyway, so we shouldn't even consider it." Something that's military grade, the heartbeat of the car, the thing that's supposed to run for years before breaking... you know, the thing that's never supposed to stop working.

Well, it broke.

Believe it. Oh yes, that's right, and Murphy stopped by for another visit yesterday, inviting all his gremlins and kilroy and whatnot along for the ride.

The car has (ok, had) two pulses; synchronized and harmonious, and literally bringing order to everything else on the car. Midmorning yesterday one of those pulses shuddered, convulsed, went flatline, and was pronounced dead a few hours later. *sob* ...no joke.

So I got to play electrical engineer for a day, helping hands for our real EE trying desperately to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Sadly we tore the car apart- scoping this, probing that, fiddling with things that hadn't been fiddled in months. *sigh* and that's the way it goes. Last competition we changed a transmission at the qualifying event- a whole day's job that somehow magically worked. I called that blog post "transmission impossible." Now we're spoofing the second heartbeat off the one good one still beating, and praying that whoever it was upstairs that liked us so much last time around still feels our pain. I think I will call this little episode "position impossible," because it describes exactly what stopped working. I suppose "repetition impossible" would also be appropriate.