sawza
 

we had to take a sawza (sp?) to a fisher price motor that had become vestigal due to design vs. implementation problems. it was at nationals really close before a match, and we were sawing motors in half. eek.

also, we were doing controls work once and the aluminum of our chassis somehow touched something and the entire chassis became grounded, and people got shocked and all the magic smoke that powers the robot escaped.:D

I think our teams was when we were testing the autonomous mode back at our school. our programmer flipped a wrong switch and the robot in an instant came toward us at top speed....we managed to get out of the way but our laptop wasn't so lucky. it was smashed into the wall. luckly only the screen was broken and the laptop was the schools so it got repaired and it is back again. scary for a few moments though.

I'd have to say 247's had plenty of scary moments this season, a bunch during build, and even more during competition! As for a scary moment during build, I'd have to say the day that we had a nearly complete robot, and decided to put it on the scale, and see how much she weighed....If I remember correctly, the robot was 20something pounds heavier than it should have been...lots of swiss cheesing was in order, and we got our weight down just in time!

In competiton, our pushing match against 45 in the quarter finals at Midwest. Our alliance partner, team 201 was losing a pushing match on the ramp, their drivers told our driver to come up the ramp and help, in a wonderfully timed manuver, Jake...our driver swiveled our wheels, moving 90 degrees to the left, and then swiveled foward, then our arm operator, Chris slapped our arm down to the ramp, turning it into a whole new strategy for us..a ramp. Jake moved the robot foward, and 45 kept pushing against us, as 45's robot clawed for traction, they drove right up our arm. Jake switched to low gear, and pushed 45 off the ramp, with their wings still down, clearing a bunch of boxes out of their own scoring zone, ( you can hear DJ screaming "put the wings up! put the wings up!" In the tape I took, but he denies that it was him. Anyways, we pushed them into the corner, as 201 tried to shove into 45's robot, and push a stack of 4 over, they finally succeeded, but we still lost the match, although it was a really, really close score!

Three things:

1) Forgetting to put the radio on in the first practice at Great Lakes. Stupid, but not too terrible.

2) Breaking a critical gear in our transmission after the second practice, then being told by our teacher there was no way to fix it. This scared me a lot more. I was envisioning our robot being out of competition for the whole weekend (or even the whole season!), but fortunately, the machine shop was able to weld our gear back together in time to play Friday.

3) Dropping the human stack in the first quaterfinal match at Nats. I managed to successfully stack bins 43 times without dropping a single one, and only received one minor penalty. Then, I got to the first match of the Archimedes elims, and dropped my 4-stack as set it down. I felt so awful for that, but fortunately, we managed to come back and win the first round.

It wasnt a scary moment for me, but I am sure it was for the drivers of 365. During the practice matches at the philly regional, our autonomous was really off and our arm fired right into the glass of the driver's station. Well being as strong as it is (hehe) we actually punched the glass right out. That was quite a sight seeing all the Moe peps jumping out of the way. Sorry guys. We had a similar incident occur with a harmless judge standing a lil to close to the field during our autonomous. Well let's just say he is lucky he still has his head.

Meredith from the Firebirds (ya know that all girls team)

Heh I had no voice left by the elimination rounds at Midwest...that was Austin screaming :p

Gah, I still say it was you DJ....let me enjoy my denial!

Being the head programer for our team and not have had any time to test auton code before regionals, the scariest moments for me was always during the first 15 seconds of our matches. Most of the time, I had no clue what the robot would do and just prayed it wouldn't commit suicide!

Which brings up the second part. Auton started and our robot was backing up (like it was supposed to), so i felt better, until the robot rotated and started moving forward, also like it was supposed to (we had a v shaped pattern). what I didn't think about was that we were very top heavy, until we lowered our wings. now, switching from 10 fps backwards to 10 fps forwards with no delay is not smart on a top heavy robot. we pulled a wheely for a good 2 seconds (felt like an eternity)! the only reason we didnt tip over was because our wings started to lower and brought our cg back down. Now that was scary!

P.S. is it just me, or do i detect just a hint of programer/autonomous bashing in this thread? ;)

Showing up at the New Jersey Regional knowing that our crate wasnt going to be there. At first they said 9 AM, then it was 10....

Once we accually got our crate at like: 10:30 we noticed that the crate was all damaged.

After opening our crate we noticed that all 6 of our batteries had fallen in and on our bot. Our light was broken, our frame was bent, our 25 pin connector was broken, our chargers which were in a bin came out and our operator control system looked like it got ran over by a train.

After 2 hours worth of work we got to play in 3 of the 4 practice rounds.

AT LA regionals it was the last match of the comp. THE FINALS, and we were paired up with 696. our opponents were team 60 and one of their alliances (i don't remember who) and the buzzer had just rung. It had been a really competative match. 60 was at the top of the ramp and so were we (294) and in the last 1.5 seconds, 696 (who had lost power for a few seconds) regained power and shot up to the top of the ramp knocking the blue alliance's robot off the top and taking its spot. (phew!) The scary part was that...not only was the ramp bent and had been pulled up just far enough to touch our right back wheel (oh boy those referees took like 20 minutes just trying to decide how to call it.. they couldn't decide whether it counted or not), but our robot was also touching our alliance's robot!! OMG!! None of our robots counted!! luckily, 60 didn't get their "feet" up either and were also DQ'd for touching the ramp. It was all up to the boxes now... drum roll please.... WE WON THE MATCH!! <but the blue alliance was the one to advance and win the comp> oh well, next year *shakes fist at Kingman*
just kidding, you guys are great!!:D

Lol I was very paranoid this whole competition. First it started out with our robot blowing up. Fortunatly we only crossed some wires. Second the program we downloaded to our robot disabled the whole thing completely so we missed a practice. We missed a practice because somehow one of the drill transmissions was not set on drill(I could have sworn that it was working when we tested it). Then there were a bunch of problems that were overblown like one of my friends said, "We broke a gear". Well lets not say what I was thinking when I walked over to the robot. After staring at it I go that gear isn't broken. There was a pain in the but problem but it was not a broken gear.

When our plane did a couple of quick drops comming into Chicago on the way back home. I hate when they do that!

Our team's arm at BAE. It swung (sp?) at everything except for the wall of bins all I remember of the moment was please inadvertently hit the stack. By NJ though the arm was fixed and everything got better ;)

My scariest moment was when we got into the elimination rounds in cleveland due to the extreme kindness of the now championship winning team 469.....

I get up to the drivers station and begin my pre match checks of everything on the controls like i always do when i notice a wire that is part of the custom routing of the joystick signal (notice we never opened the inside to rewire it, we just rerouted the way it went into the port) was broken off! I started screaming to our team in the stands for someone to throw me some tape and luckily someone had some... i was trying to tape the wire on and the refs were telling me i was running out of time. I was pretty freaked, cuz i was afraid the arm (the part i drive) wasn't going to work and there was no way to find out without either running the bot or a multimeter and about 5 minutes... So i taped the wire on and stepped back, i realized that someone had flipped out pump disabler switch in the pit so i had to turn it back on, right then the intro for our team started. It was about time for the HP time to start and i noticed that THE WIRE HAD COME OFF AGAIN! AHH ! so i started trying to tape it again, knowing i only had a few seconds left, and the ref was yelling at me that i had to get back... i jumped back away from the controls with 1 second left in HP... I had no idea if it would work or not...match starts...flip into manual arm control and test out the joystick! IT WORKS!!! turns out it was a wire for one of the switches that at that time i didn't even use:) Lucky me...


Ohh there was that...and also in a practice match on the galileo field...we were partnered up with the technokats...we were coming up the far side of the ramp and they all of a sudden started heading straight for us...i didn't know what would happen so we started screaming "WATCH OUT!! WATCH OUT!! DONT HIT US!!!" and i think i heard DJ screaming at them too...luckily we avoided a crash only to hear the mighty andy baker ask "Why were you guys screaming watch out" hehehe, he didn't even see us:)


Another scary moment was in our last match of the championship event, we were trying to go under the bar to sneak up on our oponents stack when we were slammed back by a much stronger drive train. I couldn't get our arm down because it was partialy resting on their robot and partialy on a box...so when they pushed us back the cylinder on top slammed into the bar and i swore i thought it was going to either destroy the gripper or just rip the arm off of the already beaten up plate its mounted too...

:D :D :D Yes, we remember that quite well. For a few seconds I didn't realize anything had happened until I see this arm sticking out of the glass right in front of me. It stunned us for a second and the ref had to come over and put the glass back in. Afterwards we couldn't stop laughing about it. It was so unexpected it was hilarious. ANYTHING can happen at a FIRST competition.