Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Our worst experience was an off-season event playing Aerial Assist, where team 1986 flipped our robot over. Someone had written someone's name on the bottom of our robot. Interestingly, we didn't break anything, and we probably could have flipped ourselves back over, if we had enough time left in the match.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Our aerial assist bot gave us our worst times that I have been a part of.
At the D.C. regional we didn't quite realize how much strain was being put on our turret (think like 233 but with it only on one side) and smashed the hub holding it upright. So one match we have no turret control with the thing dragging on the floor. The next match was 3 matches later. We had enough time to zip tie it upright, to find that in the following match, it tipped the other way and flip our robot 5 seconds into the match.
Then, at the Chesapeake regional, we made it to semifinals with 4067 and 233, going against the number 1 seeds. At the beginning of our first match, during autonomous, our battery clip falls out and we are dead the whole match (we have 3d printed battery clips now that attach to the andersons there for added support). During the beginning of teleop portion of the second match, we cut the pneumatic tube going to opening our intakes of our arms. To fire the ball, we had to open the arms then activate a piston to launch the ball. Needless to say, we couldn't fire, and if we opened the arms we couldn't shift gears to escape charging robots. What made this really disappointing, was we lost by 2 points, without the ability to truss, to the alliance that won the regional.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

On 4901, probably Palmetto this year. The lift didn't work well at all, the parts to fix the lift got caught up in winter weather after leaving AndyMark, the can grabber flew apart spectacularly and touched the other side to net us a disable for our troubles, and while we didn't seed last we could lean across the aisle and touch it.

On any team? The infamous Bayou 2010, when I was there as part of the 2815/1398 collaboration. 2815 was going through technical issue hell there, and probably deserved to seed about where it did...but 1398 was running respectably well, and if they put up a strong score in their final match, an alliance captain slot was plausible. Bayou was a pretty thin event, and the last match was against one of the other contending teams (364) with four other robots hovering around BLT status. Being Week 1, the field was encountering issues and running behind...issues that led to the bypassing of both 1398 and 364, resulting in a 0-0 tie and 1398 losing their crack at the top 8 due to the infuriating ranking system that year that was even more infuriating in Week 1. To this day, unless it's Palmetto I swear off Week 1.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

It was pretty sweet when it did work, though! By comparison, your dumb alliance partner spent their final matches of 2015 taking their landfill specialist robot and trying to build stacks off its ramp in the corner without tangling everything up. They actually picked the ramp up with one of the intake arms and folded it into the robot. Just to give you an idea of how well that one went. :rolleyes:

Was a fun alliance though, with your robot working we actually had a chance. We always seem to end up in a fun underdog match with you guys (like one of my favorite matches in 2014 versus 341; i've gotta find my video of that one!)

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Yeah, that was a "we worked well for the first time but our alliance kind of fell apart" situation.

If I may ask, how the heck did we end up on a pick list at all? We were truly quite terrible. I had told my team captain to, instead of "Grapefully Accept," just say, "Are you sure?" ...because we were all certain we were 100% done at the end of quals!

Oooh, please share when you do!

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Honestly, I think there is a chance that the captain mixed up 1551 with 1559. I was just as surprised about getting picked there; I thought we would have fallen at least four more spots in the draft. I think I wrote "Yes?" on the whiteboard for my alliance rep, I was just really confused.

I think the alliance captain played well to their strengths, though; as a can specialist, they wanted a human stacking team that could handle a few on field cans and another team who could make a bunch of uncapped stacks for them. If everyone was at 100%, I think we could have made something happen. Sorry about that. :o

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Alas. :D

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

I'm not entirely sure about previous years, but I think that this year, it was definitely Finals 2 & 3 at the Virginia Regional. In Finals 2, our battery got unplugged, or was never plugged in, so we were dead the entire match. (We only lost by 11 points with 1 robot down though.) In Finals 3, our capper, Talon 540, kept losing connection, so they were unable to cap any of ours or Team Rembrandt's 4481's stacks. That cost us the regional win, but as it turned out, our entire alliance still got to go to Worlds due to 4481's EI win and Wild Cards. (Thank you Sparky 384)

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

This year, between finals 2 and 3 at montreal, we had to repair a swerve module, because an angled gear went loose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV8jiSTgL9c

In this video, you can see the coach and I breaking trough the aluminum frame with our bare hands (he got cut pretty bad), then with a hammer (RIP laser cut triangles).
When we had access to the gear, we drilled through it and the shaft, breaking the bit so it would replace the setscrew.

Most intense 5 minutes of my life... :eek:

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

195 had a... dare I say... embarassing first event this year. We had never done a Week 1 event before, always iterating on the practice bot in the week or two after stop build. We got to Waterbury and dropped more stacks than we put up, and tipped the robot 4? times (so long ago, and almost erased from memory).

Our worst experience at competition in years led us to do a complete redesign of the superstructure. 2 weeks later, we restarted what became our most successful season ever.

Lesson Learned: Mid-Season rebuilds are as crazy as they're lived up to be, but sooooooo worth it.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

FRC 4607 CIS has had it's share of problems in the first three seasons of our existence.

2013 - Our Robot was deemed illegal for many reasons when we had it inspected. After 10 hours spent to reconfigure our robot into a defensive robot that could climb for ten, we wound up on the winning alliance (Yay!). We went on to win the MSHSL State Tournament with 2052 and 2175.

2014 - We could not get our superstructure to mate onto our drive deck properly for the first two matches at North Star - and the third match, our operator forgot to take the safety strap off the catapult. In our second match in the Semifinals, our partners were driven over a field element and became stuck - with the charged ball that would have been the difference. At the same time, our pawl stuck and we could no longer pull back our winch - the first and only time that this happened. We lost to the eventual champs.

At state our robot launched a ball over the truss and cleared out the judges area... as seen here.

2015 - This was our most complete robot to date. However, when we reached North Star we had complications with connecting to the FMS along with issues with the RoboRio. We spent the first 8 matches either sitting idle or jerking around the field. Our last two matches were less than great.

However, our marketing team did their job and we won the Team Spirit award.

Our lessons learned are vast and varied. This season we walked out of NS with the idea that we do need to attend two regionals - so look out Wisconsin, Duluth, or ??? - we are coming!

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Maybe this is a new one...


Our robot pooped out a battery.
I had made a fairly solid mount for it, with a door and everything. Somewhere between mounting the frame on the chassis and mounting the control system, it was removed. We drove over the step in autonomous, and out it went. Fortunately, it was quickly fixed with some rope, and that stood up pretty well.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

We had to play 5 quarterfinal matches at MSC last year

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

If you want to see an insane amount of extra elimination matches, look up IRI 2010.

Re: What was your teams worst expierence during competition?
 

Or Vegas 2014.