Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Hello! I'd like to know if any members of the CD community experienced any funny moments this season. Personally, we had a couple of them, but here's the one that stood out the most. One day, when I was testing the autonomous, it was never working when I put values of 1, 5, 10, 100, etc. At 10 000, it barely budged. So I decided to insert 1 000 000 000 000 as the value and guess what happened ... The robot went right into the wall! The engineering team was like : "Oh no! I hope nothing's broken!" And us, the programming team, we were like : "It worked!" Anyways, let's hear your stories!

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

The whole season the designers of the drive frame and our swerve drive kept saying "it can run on 3 wheels if it breaks". 3rd to last match of qualifiers we receive a catapult shot to the swerve module completely destroying it's sensors and the cim motor. By the time of our last match our robot was driving on 3 wheels.
The whole team was cracking up as it rocked back and forth on the field driving for the most part as if it still had 4 wheels with 20 pound's of chain zip-tied to the apposing side. As the design team behind it is saying told you so. Best part of competing this year.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Our robot almost went down the gym stairs... DURING A BASKETBALL GAME!!! That would have been a fun game to be at! :yikes: :ahh:

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Best part of the story: I'd love to be in the thirdend-to-last match.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

We were at OKC regional and we had just made an early and long drive. Our team decides to look for our pit without using the map, They find it and setup. Once pit scouting begins I see people are freaking out and pointing to the map of the pits. I walk over and see that they accidently put 1986 instead of 2950.

So for a few minutes everyone was freaking out "OMG Did titanium change there name." Everyone thought we were Team Titanium for like an hour. We finally got that number changed on the board. But never the less I was once apart Team Titanium for a whole hour.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Our Programmer decided that he wanted to test out the driving, so he grabbed the joystick and drove it into a wall. Sheared every rivet on our intake...20 minute fix. All this was the day after the robot ran into the wall in auto, bending our forks AND shearing rivets too.

Our new motto: "Every mechanical issue can be related back to programming." :D

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

It looks like that the same thing happened to you guys, too. We were just a bit luckier...

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Our programmer must like driving into walls...Or he likes making the mechanical team work...

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

I like both ... :D

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

One night of Build season we were having an issue with getting our drive working, and we eventually found the issue in our wiring. Our head programmer then ran around the room yelling "it wasn't a programming issue! Woooo!" You can tell we usuly give him a hard time.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

There was the ball prank that happened to us at the MAR District Championship and then we took 316's robot and hid from them after they left. They found it easily enough. Personally, I don't have any funny stories this season, cus everything worked on the first try programming wise, except for gyro functions. The only thing that happened when making those functions is that the robot spun around.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

At the PNW District Championships, the FTAs swapped a few of the teams's robots before the pits were opened. I remember seeing someone from 360 walk in, stare at the robot for a few seconds, walk out, then walk back in to make sure it was actually happening.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Our electrical team was being creative. They made a Stripper Pole!

Basically a piece of conduit, some zip ties, then hung their "wire" strippers on it.

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

After a day of qual. matches were over, and myself and some other scouters were packing up our tablets and whatnot, one of them says to the lead scout: "I think I messed up during one of the matches." The lead scout responded with: "Well then we may as well just THROW ALL THE DATA AWAY."

Re: Any Funny Stories This Season?
 

Welcome aboard.

In 2012 we had one of our mentors move to Texas. While tooling around the Lone Star pits in his favorite green shirt he ran into a couple of 118 students who happened to be at their third regional still looking to qualify for champs. Of course we would have said the same thing had the roles been reversed and 118 suddenly showed up. Was much nicer teaming up for the win in KC this year.

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.