This weekend is Star Wars Weekend at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, CA, and R2(s) showed up to help with festivities.
I arrived and unloaded a little after 3pm.
I mentioned R2(s) above because Brian Dodds brought his R2 last night and tonight, while I joined him tonight, along with Sean Christophiades and his REX droid, and James Henley and his Chopper.
We were also joined by many members of various Star Wars costuming clubs.
The Angels always do a nice job of feeding us. Pizza, sodas and water, which work for me!
Around 5pm we rolled out to greet arriving fans in the stadium's Rose Garden area.
We spent about 45 minutes providing photo opportunities, and the fans certainly enjoyed getting pictures with the characters.
Next, we headed to the bullpen area behind the left field fence, to get ready to do our procession around the warning track.
While we were waiting, R2 got a picture with R2's Angels.
Angels pitching coach Barry Enright was signing autographs. One of our characters asked if he remembered being in the stands asking players for autographs, and he chuckled and said yes.
At 6:10pm, we stepped off onto the warning track to do our thing. Our path would take us along the warning track, from the left field foul pole to the right field foul pole, by way of home plate. Queue ominous music here.
So. Everything was going smoothly. In fact, R2 was at the head of the pack, making his way around the field. He got about 3/4 of the way around, when suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. Both the feet and dome seemed dead. Needless to say, a good amount of worry set in. I walked over to R2 and tried power-cycling, but I knew this would almost certainly not help. It didn't.
I turned to Sean who was driving his Rex droid and told him it looked like I had some sort of power failure, and I would have to push R2 the rest of the way. By this time the other characters were catching up, and they realized there was a problem with R2 as well, and offered to help. The only thing they could do at that point was hold my transmitter, as I did the Walk of Shame and pushed R2 the rest of the way along the warning track, until we got to the tunnel just past the right field foul pole. Luckily I was able to somewhat bury myself amidst the other characters, but I have no doubt that many thousands (if not tens of thousands) of fans saw me pushing R2.
Once I had R2 in the tunnel area, I immediately removed the dome to see what went wrong. I checked the battery connections, and they looked good. I checked the power bus bars, and they looked good. Then I checked the main power on/off switch, and I found my culprit. One of the solder joints from the switch to the negative power bus bar had separated from the terminal on the switch. It's hard to tell from the picture, but that was the problem. I verified that by touching the wire back to the terminal and power came back on.
Last March I had
reworked this switch to support in-droid charging. Apparently the solder work was good enough to last over 13 months, but today, while driving on smooth warning track dirt, it decided it had had enough.
A couple of the other costumed members asked how they could help, and I asked if someone could grab my cart from the changing room. Sean and his droid waited with me, and about 20 minutes later R2 was on his cart and back in the changing room, (mostly) covered up in mortification.
While I did have my toolbox with my butane soldering iron and could have possibly fixed the problem then and there, I didn't want to take a chance of a second failure, plus Brian had his R2 there as well, so I decided to call it an early night and head home. I let Mike Senna know about this problem, as he is good at making solder joints that won't fail, so I plan to head over to his house tomorrow to get this hopefully permanently fixed.
If you would have asked me what a nightmare scenario with R2 would be, this would be near the top of the list. Although having lived through it, it wasn't as horrible as it could have been. We were almost done on the warning track, and I simply did what I had to do in pushing the droid the rest of the way. I think with age comes perspective, and it's just one weird failure after well over 400 successful events. I'll get it fixed and R2 will be up and running in no time.
The Angels didn't have a much better night, they lost 16-5 to the Minnesota Twins. R2's record with the Angels is now 2-6. Maybe I should skip next year for both our sakes.
