Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

every time a loose screw or loose electrical connection kills the robot and you loose a match as a result. Losing to a better team is no big deal compared to a preventable mistake taking you out of the match.

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

I've related this elsewhere, but it probably bears repeating. In 2007, we primarily focused on being a rampbot and GLR was our first regional. For various reasons we didn't get a lot of practice in on Thursday, but we were confident in our ramps, as they worked very well in a few tests at the shop. Sadly, we were using the infamous 1:125 Banebot trannies with FP motors. Predictably, we stripped out the carrier plates and were pretty much useless on Friday. We managed to get the things welded together that night and won all our Saturday morning matches thanks to some fairly impressive lifting. We all crossed our fingers during the draft, and ended up completely overlooked by all the teams thanks to poor Friday.... Except for 1114 and 67, who picked us for the #1 alliance. You're probably wondering where the bad part is, but rest assured, I'm almost there. Our alliance completely trounced #8 in the quarters. Then came the semis. Semi 1, our robot inexplicably twitched about ineffectually and we lost the match, barely. I'm uncertain of the reason to this day, but I suspect we were bit by a "charged" battery that failed to make good contact with the charged. We spent entirely too much time chasing it as a radio problem that we barely had time to swap in a fresh battery and get out for Semi 2. We ended up just strapping our battery in and running without a rear bumper. Unfortunately, our battery strap wasn't particularly up to spec and it was apparently our bumper that was holding our battery in all weekend. So when an opposing robot hit us with a decent block, our battery flew completely out the back of our robot, leaving us dead on the field. 1114 and 67 put up a good fight and we only lost the match by a tube, but it was obviously our shortcoming that lost us the regional.

I'll probably live it down someday in the future when I manage to stop posting about it annually, but I still swear I'll figure out some way to make it up to Karthik. Preferably not with a repeat performance on an opposing alliance, though.

And remember kids: Always strap your batteries!

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

A similar situation happened to our team, but regarding the Kettering Rookie Competition this year: we had district large ensemble contests on the Friday of a Friday/Saturday competition in another state, and our director wouldn't excuse us to go to that (yet other things, such as vacations, are ok... but here's not the place). That left about half our team to go, without a programmer, as I am in band. Everyone boarded the bus to leave and then Friday morning, when they're all in Michigan, a snow storm hits; contest was cancelled, and, unfortunately, none of us could get to the competition... To make matters worse, I forgot to load the correct code onto the laptop they were taking for editing, and I accidentally sent the wrong code to them... needless to say, our coach (also a programming teacher) did lots of editing to the code.

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

That is sooo funny and true.

Every year I say it is my last a few times during the season. My wife just doesn't believe me anymore.

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

I'm not quite so sure if our team has had any truly devastating moments in our team history. Sure, there have been low periods, but those are balanced out by the high periods.

I guess it all boils down to personal worst moments, which are actually pretty common. People get into fights, people think the refs were unfair, people create elaborate conspiracy theories, people are disappointed when they cant do something. The thing is though, these people usually don't let their negativity spread through the team, and instead still attempt to remain positive (except for a couple unnamed people).

So in general, even inner-team turmoil is not represented by the team as a whole.

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

From a robot perspective, the saddest thing to happen to us in team history was probably in Rack and Roll when one of our BaneBots gearboxes (loaded with two CIM's each) in a defensive robot were completely destroyed. The bad thing about this was that it happened at the second match of the Waterloo finals (the first of which we had won). The sad part was that our alliance partners had amazing robots and they wouldn't let us switch out...

The team however took away from this the lessons of prototyping and robust design; this year we designed a system where we could rip out an entire drive module and replace it in about 3 minutes.

Re: Worst Moments in Team History
 

Boy, if the worst thing that ever happens to you is your robot not working right, or missing the eliminations, or losing in a manner that's hard to swallow, you're doing pretty darn well.