What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

We all have our share of rookie mistakes! What are some of yours?

Like, Last year we had a shooter that we were testing in the pits, so we took the drive train fuses out... and we forgot to put them in so we just sat there like a brick for a whole match!

Or once we forgot to pressurize the air so our drive train didnt work well in autonomus!

Care to share?

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

In 2009, our rookie year, we used a screw drive system to prime our scoring system. It consisted of pulling a wire a grand total of about 8 inches. It took about 30 seconds for it to prime completely. We competed with that at our first district.

Come Troy, our big brother team the Thunderchickens tell us about this magical thing called "pneumatics". Took 30 minutes to replace our screw drive, half a second to prime the system (if that).

We have also, in later years, had a problem with not pressurizing the robot before a match when we used the pneumatics during autonomous.

At worlds, a member of our drive team took our drive station back the the pits when we had back-to-back matches in the playoffs this past year. We had to use our team timeout.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Not having a cart! Instead, we had four handles at the corner of our robot and we carried it to each match. It worked surprisingly well, but we still ended up borrowing a cart from our neighboring team.

Charging our batteries on the slowest setting. It took forever!

Not having a sign or banner for our pits.

Our bumpers took 10 minutes to change color!

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

One of my favorite stories:

At Nationals (yes Nationals) in 2000, we had a match scheduled for 2 PM.
The entire team went to lunch and left one kid in the pit.
The whole team planned to be back in the pit at 1:30 PM. We did not understand that the schedule doesn't really follow the clock.

We came back at 1:25 PM and the pit was empty. Then we saw the kid we had left coming down the aisle with the robot, absolutely excited and breathless.

They had played the match while we were at lunch. This poor kid had to drive, operate and be the human player. They WON the match! Not bad for someone who had never picked up the controls or thrown a ball before that day. I will never forget the look of excitement on his face or my embarrassment for missing the match.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

In 1995 the Judges created the award "Best Excecution of an Alternative Strategy" for our team We call it best execution of a losing strategy within the team). We spent the whole season building a catapult to score the balls around defense and never built the arm needed for a primary scoring mechanism. We did however get a big cheer every time our catapult fired I'm told.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

This is awesome.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Besides learning righty tighty lefty loosey?
At Oklahoma City regional, back in 2010, we nearly went undefeated. Number one seed, doing amazing, and then come our 9th match and our robot just sat there. We had no idea what was going on. We go out to collect the robot and we found out we didn't even turn it on! :o

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

"Someone" forgot to strap the battery down

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

1625's rookie year, at the 2005 St. Louis Regional, we sent a mentor out for alliance selections. We had no idea it was 'supposed' to be a student, but if I remember correctly, the team representative at the time was not required to be a student (I believe it was clearly spelled out in the rules the following year). We had no scouting system and decided our most qualified person for the job was this mentor that had been taking notes througout qualification matches.

We quickly figured out our mistake as we saw all of the other team representatives were students while ours was a 50 year old mentor with a beard and graying hair. It was a somewhat awkward situation as we had seeded 3rd and he was out on the field for all to see. I think we had some comments thrown our way of "the mentors must do everything on that team", but we just didn't know what we were doing!

He wound up doing a pretty good job as we picked two great robots (1444, 939) and walked away a regional winner.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Our rookie year, we failed to communicate with the field during our first match. We were told by FIRST personnel that our 5V supply was incorrect. Our second match was only 20 minutes after our first, and we missed it while fixing the 5V supply. Our partners won the match without us, but we din't share the points because we failed to send our human player. Those points would have spared us the ignominy of finishing in last place. Live and learn.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

In 2011 we made our claw out of plywood. The guys that built it insisted that it would be strong enough to hold up in gameplay. The FIRST match of our FIRST regional, the FIRST time that we attempted to pick up a tube another robot hit the other end of the tube that we were trying to pick up. The claw snapped. We patched it up with some aluminum bracing for the rest of the regional, made several "I'm not dead yet!" jokes, since it was painted black, and competed with it for the rest of the regional and lost in the semi's.

We machined an aluminum one before Boston, our next regional and then had a slight erm... situation... there with our alliance partners.

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First time (for me) at World Championships last year... went to go get lunch, walked all the way over to Subway and got stuck there for an hour. I had to sprint a few blocks to make it back to the dome for our match (which was almost right after lunch).

I think I waited in line for an hour for a 6-inch sandwich (by that time they were limiting everybody to a single sandwich).

Also, mistake my first year in FRC. We built a nice swerve drive, and everything was mechanically perfect. Except for an optical encoder that was slightly out of position. We didn't catch it until the end of our first regional.

Dead. Last.

I still remember our team's cheers when we scored a single tube at North Star. Oh, the joy.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Well besides forgetting to plug in our radio before a match, or putting the robot on the field without a battery, or losing our robot at competition, or realizing that we left our driver station at home 6+ hours away, or weighing our robot in kilos instead of pounds and finding out that we are 25 lbs overweight a day before ship, my team hasn't made too many 'rookie' mistakes.

Personally, I broke a tap. That is pretty embarrassing.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Hooking up the 12v to 5v converter for the radio backwards, turns out it works in reverse!

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

That just made my night!

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We decided it would be a great idea to bolt our bumpers down and it took 10-15 minutes and four people to change them. Not fun when we had nearly back-to-back matches! Thank goodness we went with a much easier design this year...
Also, our first year we didn't understand the importance of driver buttons and took them home the first day of competition. Then we forgot them the next day. That was a catastrophe. Luckily one of the moms ran to get them once we realized where they were. Phew!

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My first year, we got a brand-new Cisco wireless adapter to replace the one we had been using for the previous few years. As the only person in the shop that day who knew how to wire, I got to chop the wall connection off and wire it to a WAGO connector - but both wires were black! A little bit of magic smoke later, I realized I had guessed wrong - and we had to use the old wireless adapter.

We've accidentally sent nearly dead batteries out onto the field on several occasions.

And our Logomotion bot was an exercise in how not to design a robot: we spent most of our six weeks working on a minibot and an arm, only to realize we couldn't extend the arm far enough to pick up tubes from the ground and had no space on the robot to attach a minibot deployment mechanism.

But we've finally learned: as of today, we know that there is a tool for attaching the FlexHub snap rings for the modulox boxes that works better than the needle-nose pliers and screwdrivers we struggled with :)

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Every year at bunnybot for us. We have all of the non senior members design and build a bot with minimal help from the senior people.

My freshmen year, I, along with a group of five other students, designed this robot with a giant snow shovel on the end of a big piston. As we were driving, I bumped the controller the wrong way (our programmer plays inverted) and tilted the show shovel down into the carpet and fired the piston at the same time. We halfway did a pole jump before getting stuck. We then proceeded to trash the tread on the wheels and burn a hole in the carpet while trying to escape. I don't think the flaming chickens were too happy with that. :o

And for logomotion: Using a banebots 256 to 1 transmission to move a 13 foot arm without a counterbalance. It got to the point where we were rebuilding the transmission between every match and taking apart other transmissions for the gears. Ugh. Lets just say that I can now completely reassemble and re grease a transmission in the dark in under five minutes.

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I remember from last year a team (not mine) left a bunch of tools on their robot and they fell off during the match. I believe that they didn't get a penalty because they were not robot parts.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Last year, we almost forgot to load the game pieces for autonomous for one match. Note that at that point, all (or almost all, I don't remember) of our points were scored through autonomous, as we had no functioning floor pickup, bridge operator, or driver training (so we couldn't even balance).

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I remember my second ever match on the drive team. We got the dreaded "Turn Your Robot On" index card. So as I went and re-positioned our robot. As I'm turning back to go off the field, a referee gently taped me on the shoulder and reminded me to still turn the robot on. :o

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In 2010, my rookie year I was opening this plexi lid on our robot to test the battery voltage, and I broke the plexi lid. We taped it back together, and come match time, we went over a bump and the plexi bent inwards and turned off our robot via the power switch.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

My nickname is tap. Ive broken 5 on one job, dont feel bad hahaha.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

One word.... WatchDog
we just could not get this little bugger to work for us. and we were young enough to not know how to disable or work around it...

this was a funny moment of that same year...

Person: Hey, can you take a look at the code? the robot seems to be going a little slow.
Programmer: Sure.
-walks into the pit and over to the drive station. pushes both joysticks full forward and the robot jumps out of the pit, ripping the eathernet cord out-
Programmer: ... ... ... That seemed to be going pretty fast to me.

<lesson learned> put on blocks... ALWAYS </lesson learned>

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Last year, at Championships, we were getting ready to play a match and the MC wanted to do the wave. He was on the field and said "one, two, three GO" and the starter hit the Start button and all the robots proceeded to move in Auto. I didn't thnk he could move that fast to get off the field.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Leaving the battery in during weighing and not turning the robot on.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Lefty-Loosey always eludes at least one kid each year.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

So this is Tyler Olds favorite story to tell about me, though I wan't the only one doing it at the time...

Back when I was a freshman on 93 I was recruited to be the teams welder. I had several years experience welding but had never done TIG welding. So one night a group of us were trying to get some practice in on some new metal the shop teacher had just purchased. Nothing we did would make an arc. I mean we tried everything, change welding machines, change the gas, clean the metal, you name it we tried it. Well, after about 2 hours I had to leave, as I'm packing up my school stuff the mentor who was helping us calls me back into the shop and proceeds to show the group what he had just found... The metal had a thin clear plastic wrap on it to protect it. That is why we couldn't get an arc... Needless to say I still get needled about it today 12 years later.

So always check your metal for a protective covering before trying to weld!

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

We always ask the freshmen for:
A aluminum magnet
A bucket of Steam
Left handed screw driver
Left handed wrench

We sometimes get one who looks for 10 minutes and then begins to ask mentors where they can find one.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

This might not exactly be a rookie mistake but at Championships this year on one of the fields I remember a match right after a long break was halted. Turns out one of the little vacuuming robots got stuck under the bridge without anyone noticing and was being destroyed by robots attempting to balance. It was really funny when they pulled it out.

One of my rookie mistakes my freshmen year was during an inspection. The inspector was questioning one of our gear-tooth sensors and told us we needed to remove it. So as a nervous freshman I immediately cut all the wires to get it off of the robot. Turned out it was completely legal after all and I spent a good half hour putting it back in. I learned to think before acting after that incident. I also learned to cut electrical components in a way that might make them salvageable in the future.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

At the Championships, right after the B.E.P. concert we lost a rookie freshmen.
He went to use the restroom, and when we came back in the arena, it was clearing out. Our team had already left, and when we did a head count, found he was missing. It took about 45 minutes for us to find him, on the back far side of the staduim outside. At our end of season banquet, he did win for best rookie team member, and for a prize and we gave him a compass and a whistle.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

What is wrong with Team 422's robot in this video?

If you answered "Some idiot freshman in the pit forgot to reconnect the radio before the match, causing the team to lose a match they should have won, boosting them from 4th alliance captain to 2nd alliance captain, allowing them to meet 2753 in the finals and get destroyed instead of the semifinals," then I would respond with "No, I don't know what you are talking about. No, no, no, it wasn't me, I swear! I just personally check the radio before every match now and will continue to do so for no reason at all." :o

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piq4VSKoy54

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Did that just hit your roller claw? That's really kinda funny...unfortunate, but funny.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Yes, they left the claw down instead of flipping it back out of the way :( . My boys started to cry and walked out of the convention hall after the second time it happened. If I recall correctly, only a few mini-bots from teams like 118 could beat it.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Not my own, but there was a rookie team I ran into at the 2004 Sacramento that had not realized that there was a ship date until they got an email the Friday before. The entire team thought they had until the competition to build. They had to build a crate and robot in ~3days. They called it the 72 hour robot. I believe we referred to it as "the plywood box with wheels." It was mostly wood, with a pair of window motors direct mounted to the two drive wheels. They had taped paper signs onto the sides with their team number and school name. The team ended up as an alliance captain that year, if I remember correctly.

Of my own teams' "rookie" mistakes:

• Not removing our safety strap that held down a spring-loaded arm of our only scoring mechanism in 2005 during a Quarter Final match
• Several battery attachment/mounting issues that resulted in a dead robot
• A robot cart so tall and narrow it was a hazard
• Not including a good regulating mechanism between our hopper and shooter in 2006. Very few balls were fired when intended.
• Wheels with so much friction that the drive motor fuses tripped within a second of driving. We thought it was a communication issue. Hint: 1/2" thick neoprene is not a great wheel tread.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Oh I forgot one.

In 2008 two kids were checking our electronics board with this little mini flash light. Long story short, they forgot to take it out and left it in the drive train. We were really confused when our robot wouldn't move, and why there was a bright light shining from the bottom of the robot. This cost us an elimination match.

Yeah, we are on our game. Still not too many 'rookie' mistakes here.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

We left a parent-mentor behind at a rest area in the middle of the night. Counted the students getting back on the bus, but not the adults. So we called his cell phone to tell him we noticed he wasn't there and we'd be back - only to hear the phone in his bus seat start ringing.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Rookie year 2008 Overdrive...

So...imagine...here we are, very first practice match FRC Overdrive. 25 PantherBots screaming in joy as their robot takes off and does its 'drive straight, turn left' routine. Make it through the match and the refs disable the bots...

Two student drivers and the robot coach (an actual team coach/mentor) go out on the field to get their bot...as the students are carrying the robot off the field a referee walks over to the robo coach with a double-handful of nuts and bolts and says, 'I think you lost these...' *robo coach accepts offering of bolts, picks one randomly, hands it back to the ref and says* "No, this one isn't ours..."

Needless to say we haven't forgotten the Lock-tite or nylocks since...:rolleyes:

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

At work last week, a couple of us were making a run out to retrieve something that was left by one of the machine shops. As we're leaving, my boss says "Hey, while you're out there, tell the shop that we need a stringer stretcher." (A board stretcher is a close approximation.) I start cracking up as soon as my coworker is out of sight around a corner, make some comment to my boss about sending newbies after the metric left-handed crescent wrench, and head out.

We quickly found the item we needed to retrieve, and I waited for a few minutes before my coworker came out of the shop. "They don't know what a stringer stretcher is." At which point, I filled him in that he'd been pranked. I think we got a couple of the other guys with a similar mission later.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

What! no bucket of Sparks.

That is always a good one to ask for during a regional. The worst part someone will try and help to full fill the request:eek:

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

I can get you some cold ones.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

We may or may not have wired the DC-DC converter backwards today.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

At least you didn't switch the polarity of your battery. Blink... Blink... Poof. There goes 10 jaguars. (Happened to us a week ago)

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

It's 2011 and we are at the Bayou. Our autonomous had been giving us fits as our line trackers refused to, well, track. Finally, frustrated with the code, our programmer sets our robot to move forward based on time. I am recording next to the field with a video camera.

The starting bell sings. . . And our robot hurdles across the field. . . Backwards. It pile drives an opposing team into their front wall and they get hung up against it. I can't even remember the penalty they had to assess for that. I can't remember winning or losing the game. . . I do remember winning the regional though :-)

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

I remember watch that on youtube! You guys are famous! :)

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

That just made my day

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Could you post a link to this? That would be really funny to see! In 2011 we ran our autonomous without testing it once, but by some grace of luck it worked.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

anyone else ever put a dead battery on a robot and send it out to a match?

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

I can't find it :(

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

AC battery is a favorite

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

No, no where is my "Flux Capacitor". That's what one team asked for. So the next day I delivered to them a capacitor covered in flux :yikes:

It was all in good fun.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Wrong nuts on the power distribution board...

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

i can't remember my left from my rights most of the time
:o

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Yea, we stripped I think 3 PD boards

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

This isn't really an engineering or a competition mistake, but last year for worlds, "someone" sent the robot to the headquarters of the shipping company (which is in Texas) instead of to the competition (which is in St. Louis, MO). ::ouch::

Spent about a month working on getting it to St. Louis in time, and even then we drove 13 hours not even sure if the robot would be there when we arrived.

Lesson learned, read the full packet on how to ship the robot instead of skimming through and using the first address you find.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Not CADding up the robot before sending it to St. Louis...and not doing the BOM while building the bot!

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Omni wheel drive, bolt holes everywhere, window motors for high-load components, servos driving large arms, no battery management, no cad whatsoever, and I am sure a lot more. :o

Thankfully we have solved all of these problems.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

This year I somehow managed to forget the disks for autonomous. Needless to say I am still being and will continue to be hassled about it, but I will never do it again.

This is just as bad as me forgetting to put the pin in to hold the trailer in place during "Lunacy". Our robot took off at full speed and left the trailer sitting at the wall in front of there human player.

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This year at competition someone who didn't know a thing about the electronics board decided to plug the radio back in on the robot right before a match. Somehow they got it wrong. Luckily the FTA caught it and had us plug it back in. We don't know who did it but next time they will know how to do it.


***Make sure everyone knows to point out something if they don't think it is right but don't try to fix it themselves. ***

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

I have had 10 competitions so far (including 3 regionals), and in each one we made a stupid that prevented us from playing in the first match (fortunately, in regionals it was always practice days). The usual mistake is getting on the field with a drained battery.
In our 2013 regional, we learned our lesson, and checked the battery five times before getting on the field. Unfortunately our laptop's driver station software was not updated and we couldn't connect to the FMS...

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

If you did do this, it will send about 46 volts to the router, thus ending its life.
Luckly for us it happen on our pratice bot with the older router.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

I just remembered one more things from this year. At competition we missed all but our last practice match. When we went onto the field we found out that inspection also included re configuring your radio. We then went and re configured our radio and made it to the very last practice match of the day. We thought that we have forgotten something but we didn't remember.

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Last year, at the Chestnut Hill MAR district competition, the field crashed. The reason? As a sophomore (first year in FRC) in charge of the vision system, I was the only one who knew everything that was going on with the camera. The problem? Two (one to the cRIO, one to the driver station) 640x480 full-color, low compression camera streams, in conjunction with high bandwidth usage by other teams, crashed the field for an hour. Add on top of that that the image processing had used too much processing power at the previous competition, making our driver controls lag severely (I removed the guilty processing by Chestnut Hill, but forgot to remove the actual image retrieval, hence the two streams), and I had a pretty mistake-filled first year in FRC.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Router was fine. It was powered on for about 5 seconds before I grabbed the main breaker. DC-DC was destroyed, router went on to two regionals. :rolleyes:

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This year (our rookie year) we failed to check all of our connections to the cRio and for TWO of our matches we had no communication with the robot because the cables were loose.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

At Wisconsin this year, a newer member made some tweaks to the autonomous code, but didn't have time to test them before our last practice match of the day. So the robot went on the field with the changes.

During Auto, the 1/2" ACME lead screw on our climber ran downwards, instead of up (It moves up to release some other mechanisms that are tied into it), and instead of moving a few inches and stopping, it keeps going.

The climbing mechanism itself can only move so far down before it hits another piece of the frame and stops. Well, the lead screw persuaded it to go a ways further :rolleyes:

So, after modifying a few 3/16 connecting brackets by about 30 degrees, bending the lead screw, and immobilizing the robot by giving the climber the impression that it should attempt to stab through the carpet, the CIM stalled. And kept on stalling for the rest of the match. I believe the CIM actually survived, but it was very, very hot when it made it back to the pit.


And that, kids, is what happens when you change a '+', to a "-" :rolleyes:

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

One of the comical moments of STORM. :P

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

During our rookie year, (i believe, I wasnt on the team yet), our frame consisted entirely of welded 1/2" steel square tube. Also we are from La Jolla (by the ocean), so the bot was rusted before the regional came around.

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I recall a 2009 rookie who showed up at Los Angeles with a very nice steel tubing frame. Well, it was nice until it met the sizing box, which sent it to a grinder for shrinking, as it was a little bit too big.

It did eventually pass inspection.

Another team at the same event apparently didn't do their unit conversions properly. Very good bumper attachment system, very much out of the allowed zone. Not sure how they reworked that one.

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Last year our scouting team didn't do anything because they didn't think we would make it to elims. So when we found out we were the alliance captain for seed #8 we panicked and all of our team members decided it would be a good idea to use the OPR calculations I had been running all day. So our rep walked up there with a laptop in hand (Karthik made a Blackberry Playbook joke) running calculations. We later found out we had chosen 2 defensive bots to join our defensive bot :ahh: .

We didn't stand a chance

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Really? You mean at DC or Chesapeake...because that would have been very unfortunate. You guys were pretty good. Eats, shoots, and leaves!

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As human player for 2537, I came within about 10 seconds of doing that exact thing. The guy was about to start counting down when I asked a ref if I could get back onto the field. Fortunately it was a practice match.

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Don't worry you're not the only one, our human player last year forgot to place basketballs. During auto we were all waiting for the balls to shoot only to realize there weren't any, we have not let him off that one yet.

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And this is why you always scout in person and don't use OPR. If anything, you can help another team decide their pick.

Rookie mistake on my old team's part: In 2010, we (1002) had our entire frame elevated 1 foot off the ground. Picture here. Well, R19 that year said that robots had to be designed to prevent balls from going more than 3 inches into the robot's frame perimeter... Inspectors weren't thrilled with that, and our fix caused us to get so many penalties it wasn't funny. Also, our driver made the mistake of ramming into a robot that was trying to hang that year.

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In 2012, we were chasing technical problems for the entire CT Regional that would eventually be traced to a bad Digital Sidecar (ugh). On Saturday we hadn't moved in any of our matches, and we had a really critical last match with 177, fighting for the #1 seed. We had our problem fixed... but we didn't plug in the cluster of Andersons that wired our electronics board back into place. So we didn't move, 177 lost the match, and I thought we were done.

It turns out, we *did* get picked, but I think a lot of teams assumed we intentionally sandbagged Saturday to do it. We didn't, we were just stupid, I promise!

(Fun fact: If 177 seeded 1st, they would have most likely selected 118. 2168 would probably have picked 195 and then 2791, three robots without comm problems in the CT eliminations, possibly winning the regional. So leaving our Anderson connectors unplugged in that last qualifying match may have cost us a regional win.)

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Silliest mistake ever: thinking 1/4" ground clearance in a game called "Lunacy" is OK.

Re: What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?
 

Our biggest mistake(or blessing) was when our robot entirely tipped over at the Hub City tournament...but...the amazing part? Our drivers seemed to move the arm just right and the robot got right back up! here is the Youtube link http://youtu.be/EyCxActmHPs at 2:26 (#4499)...it was just amazing! The kids on my team were equally surprised...the judges asked them if they planned that in their design! :)