Things you only do ONCE!
 

I was just thinking about this while writing in another thread. This may prove to be just a thread to make people chuckle but it also may serve to remind teams about safety and best practices. So here goes a start for the list...

1. Touch a soldering iron to see if it turned on.
2. Carry a battery with one hand, and dropping it. (on your foot or on the ground)
3. Put the red wire on the black battery terminal.
4. Wire the radio to a normal 12 volt output on the PD.
5. Use a crescent wrench as a hammer. (power on or off, you choose.)
6. Hold a robot part in your hand while drilling. ( a variety of errors jump to mind)
7. Put a practice battery on the robot. (actually happens more than you know)
8. Build to last year's dimensions because "they never change".
9. Use a dremmel tool to grind right next to your custom 3D printed part.
10. Mount your bumpers upside down. (except teams 11, 111, 1111)

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11. Solder without safety glasses.
12. Use a hand drill with long unbound hair.

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13. Leave male ends of PWM cables exposed.

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Design the robot with Mechanum wheels.

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15: Leave a wrench on the draw bar on the Bridgeport and turn it on
16: Touch a freshly welded part
17: Touch a rough edge on carbon fiber

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We've done it twice.

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Do the trig for your autonomous mode during opening ceremonies and run the code untested in your first match.

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18. Drill something without covering the electronics.
19. Put a popped of chain back on without cutting the power.
20. Spray paint a part outside in 20 degree weather.
21. stand in front of the robot while testing the shooter.

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19. Stick your fingers into one of the big muffin fans accidentally.
20. Stand in front of a robot wearing a green shirt when the robot vision is set to look for a green target
21. Do a poor job tying down your fastener containers in your trailer on the way to IRI.
22. Put your finger on top of a piece of metal in front of the blade while cutting with a bandsaw.
23. Try to hold a piece of metal square into the sanding disk on a table sander
24. Forget to take the chuck out of a drill press with a plate-glass window behind it.
25. Grab a constant force spring and yank it off its top roller.

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Leave the key in the lathe chuck. Whatever you do don't do this.

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26. Push a team into the pyramid when they are lining up to climb.

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Although it is funny to watch people jump after doing this when reaching in the robot.

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24. Leave a chuck key in a lathe and turn it on.
25. Put 3 bolts between the sprocket and a Performance wheel, even though there is a very good reason why there are 6 holes.
26. Use a double sided intake for a ball game.
27. A week 1 regional.

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Team 1684, The Chimeras, did this last year and it greatly increased our versatility. We were constantly happy to have it.

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28. Test your robot not on blocks when you have a "joystick" with a Y axis that's stuck at -1.
29. Leave your hand on a pinch point while someone's testing the robot. (Sorry Josh)
30. Spray paint an entire crate on a just cleaned concrete floor. Without newspaper.
31. Stand directly behind a spinning shooter wheel with a "temporary" tread on it.
32. Cut off zip ties with a knife with the blade up.

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33. Live

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34. Forget to tell the robot to stop in autonomous.
35. Stay up until 1am Thursday night in the hotel room coding autonomous.

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And teams 1, 8, 88, 69, 96, 101, 609, 619, 689, 808, 818, 888, 906, 916, 986, 1001, 1691, 1881, and 1961. Any more I have forgotten?

This. After 2012, never again for us.

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My team did a double sided intake too. It was a neat little feature, but totally not worth the space it takes up (and how much fun electronic placement gets), considering how easy it is to turn around.

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36. Forget to search for a prior thread of the same topic.
37. Call the "Championships" the "Nationals".
38. Forget to have a blast doing FRC!

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39. read the first line of Gregor's signature

(I kid I kid)

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Seriously/jokingly suggest a water game on the next years game thread.

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Depending on the font, 25, 52, 205, 502, 1251, 1521, 2005, and 2255 could get away with it.


Also, Mecanum didn't go very poorly for us, granted we've never had an incredibly solid drive-train before.
Ironically, the during the first days of build season, a group of students on our team (including me) suggested what amounts to Titanium's drive-train with Vexpro shifters.

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40. Play "Ultimate Descent"

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41. Believe you can painlessly stop a runaway autonomous robot by stepping in front of it (pre-bumper days).

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42. Weld in shorts.
43. Hop around the shop like a nincompoop like you have hot spatter in your shoes.

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44. Accidentally give out spare/needed robot parts at competition because they "just looked like regular angle to me"

45. Cut yourself accidentally with a tape measure

46. Bend a pair of forceps so they fit into a small space with a nut

47. Put an 18v battery on a 12v motor

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48. Rivet right beside all the LED's

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Read the "next year's game" thread. :rolleyes:

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regolith

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50. Connect the battery's terminals with a pair of bolts.
51. Use a drill (press) and file/sandpaper as a lathe. I understand the BeachBots go through at least one lathe of that type per year on average.
52. Power on a mill with anything other than a tool in the cutter. (The bar used for tramming in the head survived, but the gauge didn't! And no, that wasn't me.)

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53. Attempt to cut hardened-steel shafts on a chopsaw (In my first year on the team, the head of drive mechanics attempted to do this. You can guess how it went. Ultimately, we turned the de-toothed blade into a pretty new clock for the shop teacher, as a consolation.)

54. Let the new electronics freshmen wire up 5 of your motor controllers, and attempt to run them without checking that they did it right. Great way to burn your money, literally.

55. Stall a fisher-price motor.

56. Reach out and flick the little-piece-of-bolt-hanging-on-by-a-thread-after-being-dremmeled with your finger.

57. Splice a PWM cable and a power cable in similar locations, and then proceed to tape the splices so that they're right text to each other. To this day I have no idea who did this, but it killed no less than three digital sidecars.

58. Leave a flashlight sitting in the drive train during an elimination match.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Our team... EVERY YEAR. >_>


53. Pull the PWM cable out of a speed controller and let the connector fall onto the +12v input terminal of said speed controller while the robot is powered on. (Fun way to make magic smoke though)

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54. Win the Chairmans award at the FIRST Championship.

... Unless you're 191.

-Nick

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55. Use window motors on something that should be fast


We managed not to learn from our first time.

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56. Use versa wheels.

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57. Leave the shooter motor unplugged before a match.

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Wire a kinect backwards. Not only did it destroy the kinect, it shorted the O-Droid X2 board it was plugged into. $250 dollars...gone.

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+1

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58. Cut spring steel with a hack saw.

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I don't want to break the flow of this thread, but why not?

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59. Design the robot before analyzing the game properly

(My team, three years in a row...)

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Versas are amazing for about one match. They are the closest thing to a cleat you can use. After that they wear down extremely fast. They also don't have much if any lateral traction since the grooves only face one way.

We switched our drive wheels out a lot to keep traction throughout events.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Done that, cut the tip off a destroyed end mill to start turning it into a boring bar... but we used the correct abrasive blade...

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This killed us in a match but it truly was only done once.

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60. Wire motor controllers backwards. Okay, "someone" may have done this more than once.

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This, indeed, was the cause of the aforementioned "letting the freshman wire your motor controllers without checking them" failure. If you're into starting fires and losing money, I highly recommend it. Else, avoid.

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61. Spill a soda on the CRIO
62. Pull the pin on a fire extinguisher and try to put it back in (this happened to us and the extinguisher blasted a bystander)
63. Use a file while holding the object (unless you need a nerd manicure)
64. Pop a hard candy in your mouth just as judges are walking up
65. Manually cut a part with the CNC machine
66. Try to save time by putting the tap in a power drill

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

WOW! I didn't think this was going to grow so big. I may have to limit this to a thread that just talks about robot, then another that talks about wiring, and another about mechanical so we can all filter through everything. Thanks for the input so far and keep it up.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

:eek: Who ever thought this would work?

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67. Neglect to load game pieces into a robot before a match for autonomous.
68. Test new motors before making sure the potentiometer is set, causing your mechanism to run full speed into a hard stop, crushing the gears inside the gearboxes...
69. Testing to see if your robot can climb to level 3 when you've already been told it cannot...

This is where you find a really good use for blue/red and white duct tape. Especially when you're queuing for a match.

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70. Forget to turn the robot on for a match. . . It's now #1 on the prematch checklist.

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Haha,

Yes when I was on 818 we may have done that. we had the flag on the '1;, and lets just say we had a lot of comments by people telling us our bumpers where on upside down. It led to a few fun moments.

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70. Touch the sawstop with anything just to see if it works.
71. Try to put something on the grinder/ belt sander while holding it in your hands.
72. use one rivet to attach tread to a wheel.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Believe it or not, you CAN use a tap with a vertical mill or a drill. However, the caveat to this is that it has to be a tap designed to be used in a mill/drill, and you have to go slowly in terms of RPM and a little faster than normal in terms of going-into-material speed.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Running the wrong auto mode (luckily this was just shoot and don't go to bridge when we were supposed to go to bridge, and not going to bridge when we weren't supposed to).

Me (with a lathe too!)

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73. Store steel cable in the same crate with a charged uninsulated battery
Poooffff!

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73. Cut the zipties holding up a banner with a knife.

I still have a scar, and I finally regained feeling after almost a year, but it's still not quite the same. This was 6 years ago at my (and my team's) very first regional in Pittsburgh.

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73. Unplug the robot while downloading code. Before a match.
74. Set-screw hubs on a hardened-steel shaft.
75. Set-screw shaft collar on the end of a lead-screw (well, that certainly did a whole lot...)
76. Set-screws in general where clamping hardware is possible.
77. Bolts without locknuts/lockwashers/loctite on a robot with mecanum
78. Entire robot frame made of 80/20.
79. Driving the robot (with an electronics board made of acrylic) smack into a wall on your first time touching the controls (board split clean in two - ironically, I ended up being driver at competition two years later).

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80. Change all autonomous command names before St.Louis because "they make more sense". (without notifying anyone...) I am not a smart man.

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81. Try to program in LabView.

*ducks*

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=+ 1. While programming autonomous for the next match "meh, 5 seconds should be good enough"

Queue Karthik "That robot isn't suppose to be there ?!"

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1551, if you use blocky 5's!

What's not to like about rotational symmetry?

Also: great thread idea, Al!

Here's at least one:

Ram your largest sponsor in the shins with an unbumpered robot while demonstrating your drive train. (That was our first year; fortunately, the driver was her nephew!)

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80. Grabbing a rivet after its been drilled out
81. Bend lexan with a heat gun
82. Use one robot appendage to do two different things (We had a scoop at the beginning of the year that we were going to use to pick up frisbees and hang. Needless to say, we took it off after our first district.)
83. Not weigh the robot until an hour before B&T.
84. Add a top-heavy FCS blocker to our robot.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

How else does one bend lexan?

85. Forget to plug the wench motor that raises your arm for climbing in before a match and have the team try to blame the programmers when the arm won't move and the robot doesn't climb because the programmers were trying to make the lights do a disco flash at the top of the pyramid.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

We've done this on several robots with excellent success. Why not?

86. Get married the night before kickoff. (Anniversary? What's that?)
87. Forget to send thank-you notes.
88. Fail to zip-tie the Anderson Connectors for the battery/PD board.
89. Use a twist and some masking tape instead of solder on sensor wires, just for now to test it real quick, then never fix it.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Sorry, I meant thick lexan. When I did it, I melted the lexan and it was a very shady result.

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90. Blame the programmers before you double check that the PWMs are all connected.

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Re: lexan, whatever you do, don't lasercut it. We've got a nice big materials sign behind the lasercutter in the lab I work in, and next to "polycarbonate," in big red text, is "TOXIC FUMES: DO NOT CUT."

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91. Use jaguars for drivetrain CIM motors

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92. Use casters
93. Use a scissor lift

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As a previous member of 449, I would like to take issue with this.

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94. Drill above an uncovered Jaguar
95. Use solder the size of your index finger for 16 gauge wire
96. Wire the "Angle" terminal of the gyro get vi to the set motor value vi
97. Touch the robot while the gyro is calibrating
98. A barrel roll with your robot
99. Order pizza while that one guy who can eat 8 pieces of pizza is around
100. Let your laptop's battery die while coding
101. Test the robot for the first time without blocks
102. Walk 4.5 miles after your team's bus broke down
103. Hack code together to make something from a stock WPI library VI work
104. Make your pick-list based on average alliance score.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

My statement stands.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

That was one of the best and most reliable systems we've ever had on a robot. It never failed. It never even required maintenance. Worked like a charm for every competition we attended, and for demos for years after.

It was also incredibly easy to make and not demanding in terms of precision, at all. Several pieces of angle-stock with three holes drilled in them, some bolts, and some nylon washers.

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105. Have mini wars over whether it should be "shooterSubsystem" or "Shooter_Subsystem"

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Camel case. Every time.

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We ain't writing no dot-net in here.

My students hate my love of conventions for nameing. whitespace, casing, etc. I'm thinking of implementing checkstyle...

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That would be successes one, failures some much higher number. I've seen a couple that were very poor, and one or two that looked decent but didn't perform as you might expect.

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Why, in all that is holy, would you capitalize the words if you're using an underscore?

Pressing the shift key, ain't nobody got time for that.

- Sunny G.

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We've run the same versa's all season with very little wear. It's 8 wheel drop.

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106: Get everything ready for your first match and forget to plug in the shooter.

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107: Leave the scouting iPad in the shooter chamber for the entire match, putting the robot overweight.

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Hmm why not?

I use the jog wheel/MIDI to run the machine for basic facing/cutting/drilling operations. Though for anything more then one or two holes I just type of a can cycle script.

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Use code from 2 weeks ago in a match by accident

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You mean we're only allowed to do this once? :( ;)

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108. Trust a programmer to not use your private parts to test the bridge manipulator.
109. Trust a programmer to not use your chest as a shooting practice target (happened in 2012, not 2013, fortunately).
110. Trust a programmer to not use your back to test the strength of a 'box manipulator' (part of our FLFL robot, a platform attached to a piston to change it's angle).

Having written this, I'm getting the feeling that programmer doesn't like me...

And another for injuries...

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108) Put the main breaker on the top of your robot only protected by a polycarb shield.

Lets just say that the totes from 2003 can deflect polycarb when the come crashing down when you hit the stack during autonomous.

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Forgetting to turn on your robot right before a match, and watching it sit there for 2 entire minutes.

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109. Build a metal-on-metal lift with no bearings or lubricant
110. Not cover the jags
111. Plug the power wires of a Spike into the motor output (it smells horrible)
112. Not put on a compressor because you assume that the pneumatics won't leak
113. Put Mechanums on backwards
114. Assume the CAD team will get the dimensions right
115. Not tell other subgroups that you're changing something (who am I kidding, we do this every year!)

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116. Not properly insulate the bottom of the gyro from the robot frame
117. Mount the cRIO is an area with serious danger of a falling lift (it still works...)
118. Use clippard air tanks. (Exploding a tank Thursday at Midwest regional makes the pits real quiet, even when it was only at ~30PSI)

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This happens WAY more than once.

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It works. We did this while building our arm, but we used a mill.

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Except HoF teams can reapply after 5 years now... so... ::rtm:: ?

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119. Mount the PD upside down, gravity works against the breakers.
120. Mount the radio inside a "U" shaped metal robot base to protect it.

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121. Assume a crimp connection is secure enough for any of your electronics.

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If you can pull the crimp off of the wire, it wasn't strong enough.

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122. Place a powered up PCB onto an exposed metal plate
123. Cut an unknowingly live PWM cable
124. Set a battery and battery charger on fire simultaneously in a lunch room (this was not my doing by the way)
125. Use Lunacy wheels
126. Try to power a crab drive with a servo

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127. Minibots. (surprised this hasn't been said yet)
128. Touch a part right after it's been welded
129. Use a hacksaw to cut a grove in a part on the lathe

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Hey! I think our CAD team does a fantastic job. I'm the only person on it, but I think we did okay...

130. Use Toughbox Nano Tubes.