Subject:
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Pouring Milk Into Your RCX at 1:43AM
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Wed, 18 Jun 2003 15:39:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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404 times
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Hey folks,
Apart from sitting in Altimas, Accords, Mazda6's and berating the VW dealer, I
found myself the night before pouring milk into my RCX2.0. Let me explain.
Late Monday night, I was playing with a certain new Lego set, trying to make a
walker. I had it walking (actually wobbling) with the windup motor, but I
figured I should go with the electric instead. So I plugged it in and found I
didn't have any batteries in my battery box.
I dug through PipeRacers v1 stuff (John and I playing with straight pipe several
months ago) and found my RCX. Started popping the batteries out and loading
them into the battery box. On the fourth one, I realized the frickin thing was
leaking acid.
I have a fear of acid in general. It started at age 6 or so when I got a 7725
as a present:
http://peach.mie.utoronto.ca/people/tsangc/lego-memories-train1.jpg
I found to my horror that the three batteries in the blue boxcar had leaked and
destroyed the contacts. As a result, it never worked again. I was crushed. (I
guess we didn't have Lego's kick-ass Consumer Affairs hotline back then, or my
parents didn't know)
My next run in with acid was at age 19 during CHE112S "Chemical Engineering:
Your Friend and Mine!" in my first year of university. I sat on a lab stool
which must have been splashed in acid, because when I got home hours later, my
pants had literally twenty holes in them. The strange thing is, I was so
frickin tired, I didn't notice. (That was Term 1S and I had 37 hours of class a
week, including 9-6 with no breaks)
So, I rushed to the kitchen to clean it out with water. Which is when I found
myself staring at a jug of milk. American readers will not understand this-only
Canadians get milk in bags which you put in your own plastic jug with a handle,
but I digress. You folks also don't have poutine, federally mandated healthcare
and a reason to be in Iraq.
Now, the last time I heard anything about chemistry was in high school (CHE112S
primarily an exercise of "Beware Penny The Evil Lab Manager") but I remembered
milk as being basic and so to counteract the acid from the battery...
Ever hate pouring too much milk into your tea/coffee at work becaus ethe spout
is too large?
...well, I didn't intend to pour so frickin much in there. Needless to say, I
found myself seeing milk in the LCD display. Then I had to wash it out with
water.
Which still didn't remove the build up on the metal contact, so I went looking
for q-tips. If you think dousing your RCX with milk at 1:43AM is funny, try
finding q-tips at 1:47AM. Q-tips are frickin impossible to find when you need
them. You never need the entire goddamned box of 500 of them, you always need
one or two. So as a result, if you lose the entire box in say the linen closet,
then you're screwed overall.
Q-tips didn't clean off all of the residue, so I switched to toothpicks to
scrape the connector off. This is hard to do. I'm not convinced it's all gone,
but most of it is.
So, it's been drying out for two days now and I haven't dared to turn it on
again. I don't think the milk helped, in all honesty, but seemed like the right
thing to do at the time. For whatever reason I have that late at night.
Calum
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