Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

You have no idea how many times the same thing happened to me! The instant something goes wrong with the robot, everyone stares at me and tells me to go over my code again. And you know what? Out of all the times something went wrong, there was only one programming issue. The rest were usually electrical issues.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

During one of our practice matches at Buckeye one of our encoders was unplugged. The robot reacted by turning straight towards a group of judges and shooting the ball at them. The worst (or best, depending on your view) part was that none of them were paying attention when it shot.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Ha ha ha ... do you, by any chance, have a video of that?

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

I don't personally have any video (I was driving and not expecting it to mess up) and I don't think anyone bothers to record practice matches. I'll have to get someone to record them in the future just in case something like that happens again :p

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Three programming stories:

We were testing autonomous, and it was supposed to drive to a certain distance from the wall using a control loop, but no matter ho much we mangled the code, it always drove backward into a wall. Nothing broken, but it took a long time to fix that to drive forward.

Then, in the second to last match, we discovered a prescaler in the code to slow the robot down for safety. Once removed, it worked so much better!

We finally got our autonomous working perfectly... after the very last match!

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

During one of our early matches at West Michigan we accidentally left the safety strap over our catapult. We spent the match playing hard D on 2054. We still won the match.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

This was actually from last season, but our team found this funny (me not quite so much).

With the full court shooters, we toyed with the idea of adding a pool noodle (or whatever) to our robot to play defense. Of course the downside of that strategy is that the robot could move toward us and touch us for foul points.

We had just mounted an ultrasonic to help us with our autonomous code so that we would be the correct distance from the low goal when we tried to dump, so we set the drivetrain on a PID using something like 20" on the ultrasonic as its set point.

I had a media cart with a poster-board over the side trying to emulate a full court shooter in the corner and I was trying to push the cart fast enough toward the robot to touch it before leaving the safety zone. Then I'd try to go back to feed position.

For the most part the approach was effective-- it would back away and go back to guard position faster than the human driver could react and it was nearly impossible for me to tag the robot while the media cart was still in the safety zone.

However, the drive train didn't always move straight forward and back, and after a couple iterations, it would no longer have the ultrasonic pointing at the media cart and instead found the wall behind. Suddenly the robot was coming straight toward me , trapping me against the wall . Then my leg would step in front of the sensor and it would back away, only to charge at me again.

Members of the team who had no idea what the programmers were tying to do saw the robot attacking a mentor and thought the driver was upset or possibly the robot just simply did not like me. Apparently it was quite hilarious ... :)

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Blame it on electrical instead XD

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Team 4215 decided to completely change designs 11 days from the end of the build season. By some miracle, we got a finished robot that actually worked. However, when we bagged it, we were still overweight (about 121 lbs) but when we weighed it at our regional, it was 119.8 lbs when we took it out of the bag. And to make things even better, we passed inspection on the first try!!! (first time in our team's 3 year history)

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

I was part of a secondary drive team at GTRE, in the case that any of our main drivers were unavailable.

During a practice match we were loading in from the human player. On our driver station, the fire-launcher and drive controls are located on one joystick. I got a bit jumpy and fired the launcher instead of driving back.

The ball came out of the launcher and hit a referee straight in the face. Also, 1114 and 1241 were our alliance partners. I'm not living that one down.

(If that referee is out there, I'm so sorry).

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Wow ... do you have a video or any pictures of that match?

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

I'll try and find some, but other than the 5-ball auton I really don't think so. And I kind of don't hope so.

EDIT: Here's another perspective of that practice match.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

OK, it'd be cool to see the video of the 5-ball auton in action, though.