Scarriest 2003 moment
 

What's the scarriest moment you've experienced in the 2003 season?

Mine would have to be a close call between the last match at Rutgers where both 25 and 87 teetered on top of the ramp, and having a qualification match which included 2 Ameyas in the same alliance..... That last match was most definitely a nail-bitter, but 2 Ameyas on the same team....WOW. Hahaha.

Try showing up to a regional and your crate wasn't there...thats scary....

We had a perfectly functioning autonoumous mode in the quarterfinals at LA. Then, our programmer changes something and loads it in right at the last minute before our semifinal match. There was no time to test it. Our programmer has been known to forget to change do something to the code causing catastrophic results (like not initializing at all). Luckily, what he changed only made a turn a tiny bit sharper for a dead straight run up the ramp into the wall of stacks. Wheew.

One funny moment was in a practice round at AZ when our brilliant primary driver forgot to turn on the robot before the match. Once auton mode was over, he realized it wasn't working so he ran onto the field in the middle of the match and flipped it on. The refs and judges were shocked and yelling at him to get off the field and never do it again.

Another funny time was right before the first quarterfinal match in LA. We were doing testing over at the practice field. On the back of our robot we have a flip up panel to cover the spot where the battery goes. We broke our battery hold down in our last qualifying match but I guess our programmer was not aware of that. He hit the button to start autonomous and the robot accellerated but the battery did not. The cover flipped up and the battery flew out the back, unplugged itself, slid across the floor and the robot rolled for a few feet without it. A guy from our partner team 968 came over and said "Did I just see a battery fly out the back of your robot?" BTW, thanks for making us a new hold down.

Oh, and another one. When we were testing over at the practice field our programmer had his switches set for the wrong side of the field. He is sitting on the floor with his laptop by where the field barrier would be. He pulls the trigger to start the run and the thing opens it's arms and comes rushing toward him. 122 lbs moving at 10fps is something you don't want to be in the way of. He was sitting on the floor and simply could not get up fast enough. He took a good hit but it kept on pushing for about 10 whole seconds until someone could come hit the breaker.

Another one is when we were testing down at 294's shop. We had a school laptop sitting on the floor and the robot runs autonomous and turns too wide and is heading strait for the laptop. We are all yeliing "STOP! STOP!" Someone finally gets to the disable switch on our OI and the robot stops about 2mm away from the frame blasting through the laptop.

Some of these stories might not really be scary but I just had to share them.:)

Off the top of my head, the scarriest moment for me was when I was human playing, had a pair of safety glass (just a little to big) on, and managed to nail them with the boxes. I actually managed to grab them and my last box, place it on the field, and get back to the pad in time *phew*

When we were building the field, the only power saw we had was a battery powered circular saw. It would take about 2 hrs. to charge and would run down with ~5 mins. of use. While waiting for it to charge, I got the bright idea of using the robot battery to power it. We sent someone to the other room to go get some wire and another person wired it up. What I didn't realize until after the saw was turned on was that the wire used to power the saw was 24 gauge wire. The wire acted like a fuse and started melting and causing lots of smoke.

We were working on autonomous mode and I was following closely to the side of the robot. I had forgotten that I had programmed the wings to lower and when they did they smacked me in the head. The operator at the time quickly switched back to driver control and frantically pressed the button to raise the wing. He managed to raise it and then immediately lower it, therefore smacking me in the head again. He then raised the wing and unplugged the OI. This caused the wings to go back to the default state of wings down which hit me in the head for a third time in less than 30 secs.

We were testing our robot at 447's field and in going up the ramp we tripped the auto-resetting breaker controlling the right wheel. The robot then veered to the right and knocked down the plywood ramp wall as well as the 2 stacks of about 10-12 bins each on the other side of the wall. The robot ended up doing a nose dive from the 2 ft. tall platform and landing face first on the floor.

We got flipped over at Nats (first time it happened ALL season) and our battery fell out...I guess it wasn't exactly scary. But it was definitely surprising.

But being in the finals at SVR with every capability of winning, and being part of the drive team, THAT is scary.

this year - when our human player forgot to set the L/R switch for autonmode - the bot turned the wrong way and SLAMMED into the railing right in front of the judges table (our bot top speed is about 12mph)

a piece of the front (Skyway) wheel came off and hit one of the judges - we hit the railing so hard the robot controller reset, so auton mode started over again, backed up about 10 feet, turned right, and headed for the opponents player station at full speed.

Slammed into that so hard it left a 2 foot long gouge in the plexiglass wall.

We had talked about testing our robot, for robustness, before we shipped it, by running it full speed into a brick wall. We never actually ran that test, until the above mentioned incident at Buckeye.

Another scary moment - when we were testing auton mode at our site before shipping, and a stack of containers was knocked over, into the two containers on which my ThinkPad was sitting (holding ALL our SW on its harddrive - not backed up anywhere else).

The LCD was half knocked out of the laptop - took me half an hour to put the laptop backtogether. THEN I got the floppy drive out and backed up all my files - Figure I would NOT get a third chance :c)

During our first quarterfinal match at Rutgers, our robot got flipped(we’re only 12” high!!) and our partner lost their battery connection in the first 30 seconds of the match :ahh:. I thought all hope was lost, but then our opponents got disabled for intentionally knocking our partners battery off.

Wow, I guess I'll be the first person to mention a scariest moment of 2003 with no robot directly involved. I am sure that most of my team would agree to this ( though I am not speaking for ALL of them) but the scariest time was the agonizing wait to see if the school would allow us to go to Houston. Then to be able to and have our teacher say we didn't deserve it and should let another team take our place! :ahh: (He was right though and nobody argued his main point)

P.S. I hope whoever was the last team to enter Archimedies did GREAT!!!!!

Friday morning: St. Louis: Team 1020's pit. Another day, another 6 drive trains to try out. We've got a few pounds to lose in a half hour. We can do it. Everything's going good, right?

But something's not quite right...

"Amanda!?!?! BATTERIES!?!?!?! "

"(Explatives)..."


That was the scarriest moment for me, but I laugh about it all the time now. Amanda forgot the batteries in the hotel. She quickly brought them back and we had them for robot inspection.

ARCH- i think this may have been w/ ramtech. but i dont remember. i was human player and we didnt want autonomous so i was taking my time, i put a stack of 3 our allie hada stack of 4 and i was to go over ana place my last box on their 4 to make a 5, i walked over and put it on, then i walked back to notice that the clock was at 13, so i dashed over and hit the pad just at 15!! WHEW... we still got control.

more scary, being undefeated throughout nationals, 13th seed, and not getting picked in your division.. more shocking tho.. :ahh:

Re: Scarriest 2003 moment
 

Wow 87 was mentioned by someone other than me on the message boards. anyway that was a nail biter just like our philly match where we came close to winning but didnt...

The Kickoff meeting when Autonomous Mode was announced :D

I already posted this in another thread, but it was the last match in the galileo division, and I dont really remember who we were up against. At the beginning of the match, our opponents got most of the bins, so we had to clear out their scoring zone. We were pretty sure that whoever got on the ramp would decide the game, as there werent many bins around. Well, at the end, our robot is on the ramp and our two opponents are on the ramp. I dunno who are partners are, but instead of trying to push our opponnents off, they push US off of the ramp. At about 5 seconds remaining, we thought we were screwed, cuz our robot was touching theirs and we were off the ramp. However, I managed to maneuver the robot so that we ended up with only 3 wheels touching but our center of gravity was on the ramp so the fourth wheel lifted up. We ended up winning by one, with a score of like 58 to 57 or something.

What made this match so intense was the fact that we were #1 seed, and if we had lost this match we would have dropped significantly. Man, I almost had a heart attack at the end, because I was so close to touching our partner, which would have gotten us like 8 points for the match, which probably would have dropped us to around 5th or something. I almost made the call to get far away from the ramp at the end, to make sure we at least had the 25 points for our partner being on. Lucky I didnt!

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.

being the third team picked by the 8th alliance.

NOTHING beats the scariness of ALMOST not being chosen.

Except in the semis when it went for the judges table :yikes:.

Well I am glad you laughed, I found it amusing as well :D

Scariest Moments, well! I can relate to these. Lets see, At Regionals, one would be going into our frist match, not testing our auto, or competing in the practice rounds, wondering what our robot would do. Needless to say tipping, was quite a scary though, and we did, darn high CG.


Two, Being the HP, doing my normal stacks, only to have them fall down, outside of the colored carpet, running back in to set them up right, and running out with about 5 second left, tripping going outside of the field, and scrambling back to our pad so our auto will work, much less our robot, which I made it back in time FHEW! I thought my team was going to kill me if I didn't make it back in time, but they were to busy laughing....


In the building process, holding our robot near the chains, telling my tem not to touch the contollers, only to have them nip them as joke, and take off the top of my knuckles, and then trying to hide it from them so they wouldn't feel bad, luckily they didn't see, but dude, when you can see your bone moving, that isn't cool, much less CALMING!


Another scary part, sitting down under a table being sick, having your friend drive the robot at the table full force, only to have it barely stopped maybe a cm away form you by the table top, THANK GOD we were a stacker...


And, just because, one of the scarist moments, was at Regionals. I was walkng outside with someone from OakRidge when they were practicing Auto, and seeing it for the first time go up the ramp in 3 seconds flat, I stopped dead and went "We have to go against them....crap...." But we won that match, pushing both them ad their alliance partner around, ^^


Along with other things, missing parts, missing told, broken wires, ect, liek at Nat's, almost not making check in...(Thankies to whatever team offerd the whole saw (sp?) even though we already had one)

Aughhh...reminds me of the agony waiting to be chosen by the first seeded team who'd picked their 2nd team, who picked us

and the agony of that last match

Scarriest moment. For team 68.
 

Ours was defineatelly at the Arizona Regional. We were folding in our "second stage" of our arms, while our pit crew was trying to fix it. One of our students gor his hand cruched in the arm. Ouchie!

Also, at nats. One of our team members (different one), tried to push our 2000 lb toolbox up that really steep ramp, well, to put it simplly, he was in the hospital for the rest of the day.

My scariest moment came about 15 seconds after our team won the West Michigan Regional. The realization that I would have to keep my word and get my hair cut. Come to think about it, it was when they handed me the second handfull of hair and I realized how bad I had been butchered.

Re: Scarriest moment. For team 68.
 

So the hand didn't go to hospital?

And *puzzled and not sure I want to know* why was nats team member in hospital?

Most likely a back problem, pushing a heavy object up a ramp like that can be trouble

Once, in a rush to get to the field for last call, we had our programmer crop the auton mode out so we only had our basic control programming. Well, he set auton to come on no matter what, on accident, so I had to get back in 10 seconds or else we'd be dealing with some pretty unhappy judges...

I got back in time, and then it didn't do anything for auton... and then it didn't drive after auton. Well, it turns out that not only did he have auton to come on, regardless, but it was going to run for two full minutes.

We didn't know what had happenned until we ran it back to the pits, panicking.

When in a match, one of your team members comes dashing over and starts screaming "SMOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!" at you. And then you realize the whole area smells horrible. <-- (twice...)

When you see your robot flip, the split moment before you realize it can re-right itself.

Seeing a half inch shaft of steel bent so that 2 sprokets... meshed...

The most scariest moment for me was at svr during qualifying we got flipped over n we FORGOT the spare part for our scissors mechanism 4 stackin so I was FREAKIN out when we flipped....we had bent some pieces so we had to reshape them in the pit.....:( But it was all G after....

my scariest moment was in galileo at Nats, just after i realized that not only had i accidentally flipped over our alliance partner (the only flipping we had at nats), but I kinda smashed bits of their robot off as well. whoops.

I remember many moments holding my breath and just staring wide-eyed at the field, but the only one I can actually remember is when we were at...nats, I think, during a practice round(??) and I couldn't see the clock very well for HP mode. The coaches had asked that I have us skip Aut. mode (back to the mat btwn 11 and 15 sec.). So I thought ten seconds had already passed, but I was wrong, and our robot's arm slammed into the bar backwards. That was when I said oh crap and my drive team gave me the death stare...sorry guys :( Everything was ok though, so yay for that...

My scariest moment ever was actually last summer. We were demonstrating the 2002 robot for the Flag Day Parade. Our team used a tractor-trailer (semi-trailer) that was about 5-6 feet tall. We modified it with safety railing made out of PVC. Well nobody every realized it, but the safety railing was taller than the robot...

Come parade time, we're cruising down the parade route. Suddenly the robot controller starts spazing out as the robot is coasting toward the side of the trailer. I quickly leap toward the robot and grab it (and hang on for my life) as the robot is 1/3 hanging off the edge of the trailer. Any closer before we grabbed it and for sure the robot would have fallen off.

We still joke about it by saying, "The robot probabaly would have fallen off, hit the ground with a thud, and kept on driving!" We won the Motorola Quality Award at MMR.


As for this year, I can't really think of any that were particularly unnerving.

I think by far the scariest moment for me was at the J&J Regional, in the pits after probably the second practice round when our stacking arm wasnt working and our teacher gets the bright idea that we should cut down the robot so it can go under the bar. Now, mind you the robot is about 3 1/2 feet tall and cutting it down to fit under a 14" bar would be major work. So my reaction was basically ":ahh: WHAT!! YOU WANT TO DO WHAT!!!! NO YOUR NOT TOUCHING MY ROBOT!!! I WONT LET YOU!!!" and i continue screaming at the teacher. I almost had a heart attack lol. ( i have emotional attachments to the robot probably due to the fact that most of the time there were only 2 students there and when its just you with the robot, you tend to form a bond :) so yea, hes my baby :) )

Also at J&J, we set the autonomous program and it worked pretty well, except for the fact that the other team basically had the same program as us, and well we hit the bins at the same time, our robot stops short n then proceeds to get pushed back and eventually lands on his back at the bottom of the ramp with the battery about a foot away.

Another sorta funny moment was when in one of the matches, i was driving and i couldnt really tell our orientation, so in my efforts to get to the top of the ramp, i drive full force into the side walls, which causes our robot to fall on his back (again). It was actually really funny cuz it happened so quick and the robot basically drove and then fell lol.

watching a bosch break wide open
 

This year at SBPLI my team realized that the bosch at the end of our arm needed some tweaking(to say the least).

We had a bosch mounted at the end of our lifting arm, and due to driver faliure, design flaw (sproket getting caught in ramp grate), to much tension on the chain attached to the motor. our bosch gearbox tore open throwing gears all over the field.

needless to say after that we realized that we needed to to put a metal shield around it.

but it wasnt fun watching it explode, not once but twice

My scariest moment was when out robot wouldn't turn or spin for two national final competitions. During first match, i got the the top of the ramp 90 degrees to the position i wanted to be in, and realized i couldn't spin to put the wings down. After some serious stress attacks, I finally figured out that crabing and spinning at the same time worked. I'm sure thankful it happened at the end of the compeition.

Re: watching a bosch break wide open
 

You beat me to it again! Well I still have something, the scariest for me as our teams autocoder was when the automode pulled a way too wide turn and I thought it was going straight into the wall. Which it did, but not without taking an opposing HP stack with it. If anyone asks, it was supposed to do that ;-). So that's scariest for me anyway, next to the motor....glitch.

The scariest moment for me and a few of our team members was at nationals. I dont know if anyone is familiar with out robot but we have a telescoping arm that extends and swings to hit the bins on the ramp from our starting position. Well, we just changed motors on our arm and had been having a lot of trouble with it the whole day. So we tweaked a few things and brought the robot over to the practice ramp. So we had all the bins lined up ready to go and the robot was set. Well me and a few other girls were standing there waiting to start the autonomous mode. So we turn it on and found out (quite quickly) that we did not set the right direction for the arm to swing. So instead of the arm swinging and hitting the boxes, it swung at us and nearly took all our heads off. Needless to say, we made sure to check the direction of our mode from then on.

another scary moment was during a match when mikah went to place the bins and they all fell over...cleveland. he managed to get two of the boxes stacked properly...which is what we were aiming for....it was still scary to see all of your boxes go flying down and scattering.

Was this before or after the Championship? You seemed to have an abundance of hair then. Enough for our kids to spike, anyway. :)

In the style of the Firebirds, it wasnt us who was scared, but rather we were doing the scaring. Upon our arrival at the Houston airport the day before Nats we just happen to come across Patrick Swazey (from Dirty Dancin) clad in leather jacket and pants of course, and with staple aviator glasses. A few of us birds stealthily follow Mr. Swazey hoping maybe we can get the guts to ask for a picture with him. He definatly noticed us staring at him, and so he quickly walks outside. Well we move in a little closer, and again he notices, and taked cover behind a huge piller outside. When he finally had to make his move across the airport, he walked, almost ran, right passed us. We didnt manage to even get a snap shot of him, but it did make for an interesting phone call back home to the biggest Swazey fan on Earth. Ok, so we scared him a little bit, we couldnt help ourselves. I have one thing to say though, if Mr. Swazey did not want to be recognized in a public airport, why then did he wear leather pants, jaket, and aviator glasses. Not the best outfit for blending in.

lol, this was right after we won west mi.. sat him down at the top of the ramp, and to racous cheering.. took his ponytail out..

i noticed he did spike his hair too on the webcast.. well at least your not totally bald steve : P

my scariest and funniest moment ,was the first practice match at CR with our auto mode on.. we rolled out, made a perfect "V" turn, and smacked dead center into the front of side railing. Luckily, we had a bunch of lexan and bosch framing there, so nothing was damaged, and i remebmer looking back and laughing because we hit it with so much force, the ramp wall became disloged, and they had to tape or secure it donw..hehe

Yes... Steve is always scarry... ;) What about the time when we found out that the gearbox doesn't work and had to build a new one in a few days, that was scarry too... But it doesn't compare to steve... :P

Ok. So we're standing around in an open area at the Great Lakes Regionals, and practicing with our robot, right? We manage to forget that it was set in autonomous mode. Our robot was being held up so that the tread wasn't coming into contact with anything. But the wings... the wings normally fly out after a few seconds. Luckily a team member had the presence of mind to remember that, yelling "OH. SHOOT. WINGS!" and jerking the robot backward before it can smack anyone in the stomach. LOL.

Another one. Four or five of us were in the pits, and I was gluing the tread together. Our control board (which folds up) just so happened to be on top, plugged in but nonetheless folded up. So it can't do anything, right? WRONG.

So gravity starts working on the controls and the treads start going while I'm gluing.

Good thing I have quick reflexes. :p

ouch lisa- i wasnt there for that one