Strangest moments at compititions
 

Post what strange moments or interactions you had with other teams during competitions or other times at that, things that you wouldn't expect but would only probably find in FIRST.

At the NJ regional we had these huge massive arms last year (2008) that got ripped off when another team clipped us. After that happened we actually did better and we tracked down the team that clipped us and thanked them for destroying our herding mech and showed them what we did with what was left of it (we had a panel that moved up and down) so we stuck teeth to them since they were now useless. I believe it was MORT....

Before: http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x...g/P4070701.jpg
note the arms on the flap that goes up and down
After: http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x...g/P4090751.jpg
Teeth :D

Thanks MORT, if it wasn't for your beastlyness out bot wouldn't have teeth!

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waching as our 2007 robot did wheelies(this thing was a beast) into other robots....

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In 2007, before our entire team wore cheeseheads, I wore a cheesehead in Atlanta. I was eating lunch with a group from my team when a few girls from another team came over. One asked if she could have some cheese, and proceeded to try to pick some off. After realizing it is foam and not cheese she turned and ran away pretty quickly. She seemed pretty embarrased, but I found it hillarious.

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The strangest moment was last year at VCU when, after two years of being a minion, I went up to the stands for lunch and realized that was the first time I had been out of the pits the whole time.

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When our elevator wire kept snapping, our neighbors in Atlanta (Team 1983 Skunkworks) showed us a lightweight rope that supports ~5000lbs of force. It's the fantastic stuff used in sailboats...I got an up-close view of it this summer out on the Chesapeake...

Had our FTC bots not worked so inadequately at the Va State competitions in December, our FRC team wouldn't be so diligent about documenting firmware and software updates.

Eh, nothing really extravagent.

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and in 2007 when our robot lost two treads on the left side, and justin got it all the way back accross the field and up a ramp in 27 seconds for the win...

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Our 2008 robot's arm. 'nuff said(for those of you not at Colorado, we ripped the thing to shreds several times. At our last match it looked like the arm had scabs on it.)

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I remember at the NJ regional the Canadian Waldo team was there...they stopped by our pits and this kid on our team pulls out his camera and goes "hi!" *click* and walks away.

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2008 pitt. our plexi shattering. yes we learned our lesson

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I think I recall one time at FLR when a team had brought in a ton of cardboard boxes and made a massive fort out of them down on the floor.

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Priceless.

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The first time I saw Dave Lavery zipping around on a Segway.

The first time I saw Dean Kamen zipping around on a Segway.

The first time I saw Al Skierkiewicz and Dottie Skierkiewicz traveling around the pits together on their Segways.

The first time I saw Mark Koors riding his bicycle between the FRC fields at the Championship, slowly.

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I would say at the 2008 VCU regional.
Spending five hours on Friday morning putting together a 25 by 25 Cristopher Walken picture. Only to find that we were missing four pieces and that they wouldn't allow us to put it up anywhere...Atleast it have ten minutes of fame.

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I remember that! It needed more cowbell.

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At some regional, I forget which (or the year), a kid came up to the earplug dispenser we have in our pit. The earplugs are white and another bright color (purple, yellow, or green), so the kid turned the handle, one popped out, and he put it in his mouth...

THAT's when he realized it wasn't candy.

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That reminds me of something that happened last year.... In Atlanta we were waiting for our match behind the black curtain. I saw some volunteers walking by, looking very focused, so I looked over. Dean Kamen was driving around in a smart car and the volunteers were making sure he didnt hit anybody. That was not one of the things i expected to see.

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In 2007 on the trip to Florida regional, I had to use the restroom at the back of the bus. My teammates thought it was funny to put their foot on the door handle so I couldnt get out. The doorlatch broke and I was stuck in the bus restroom!!! Worst off, the light was wired to the lock, so when the door was unlocked, the light was off. After 20 minutes I was able to pick the lock with my student ID. I am a mentor this year and I still haven't lived that down.

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I liked when we got a small tear in our bumper fabric and stuck a bandaid over it. This was not at competition, but we brought the bumper to the CT Regional as a spare to keep in the pits, and we got some comments on it.

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One time, we needed a piece of lexan cut and just had a hand saw. We had three people keeping the lexan from wobbling and it still kept shaking. Our safety person was telling us to be careful because it was making him nervous, when a guy came up to us and game us a safety point. He said that we were doing a great job of being safe. I half expected that he was going to get onto us. He even said that he would have given two if we had safety gloves on at the time.

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Ouch, man now I feel bad knowing we did that.

Sorry bout that if it was us..unintentional damage of course. Long time ago though.

Lol at the story about 1676 though haha:P

To make up for it, let me know if you guys ever need any help.

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In 2005 I waited in line behind some kids from the Duct Tape Bandits (467). From what I gathered, it seems that someone had squirted a mayonaise packet into one of their duct tape helmets, which the kid not realized until after he put on his helmet. :ahh:

I've always enjoyed the awkward post-autonomous apologies when a robot does something it was "definitely not supposed to do." They were especially common last year with that those line penalties

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Mine was probably last year in a practice match ... our robot autonomously rammed our team mates robot and flipped it over with our pneumatic arm.

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Palmetto Regional, 2005, on two counts--both involving 179 in their sole experience there. (Geeze, they come up here, win our regional, and we never hear from them again! You figure they'd at least send a postcard... ;))

The first was Thursday. Also attending Palmetto that year (and also not seen in the state since) was 25, Evil Machine 3 in tow. I was scoping out 179's robot, chatting with Dan Quiggle at the time. As if he were talking about the weather forecast, he nonchalantly mentions "By the way, you're about to get bearhugged." Two arms snuck under mine, and my 250-pound self was about a foot off the ground courtesy of Big Mike. Supposedly, there are photos somewhere. Never seen them.

The second came as a side effect of 1293's hats that year. It was the first year of the sawblade motif, and the team cut hats out of corrugated plastic in the shape. Painted up, they looked pretty good--I still have one. I was wearing mine in the pits (combined with my typical hairdo) when Tytus Gerrish (then 179's driver) comes up and randomly says "You look like Jesus." I didn't think I had the beard for it, but such is life.

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in the semifinals of the KCR, are robot stopped dead, damaging our hopes at nationals. Our fate was sealed by a fast robot that sole purpose was to rack up points by going round and round. by the way robotcanuck1676, how did you get that eagle scout bar? i am a fellow eagle and would like that to appear for me.

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At a practice match last year, one of our robots had a software crash and plowed through the field barrier in hybrid mode , which resulted in like 6 people trying to restrain the robot and power it down. And this was with a binary that had literally no autonomous code, and the problem never happened again :ahh:
And at the same event, our other robot managed to go through the plywood center divider, requiring people to run out with duct tape to fix it

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In 2005 and 2006 when my team made it to einstein, the weirdest/funniest/ most crazy part was when I looked up into the stands during those matchs and seeing just how many people filled the georgia dome to watch these robots play on a field. People filled every sit on the 1st and part of the 2nd tier of the stadium on that side of the arena. Just kind of strange to me...but I guess a sign the FIRST is changing the culture.

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Our team had an interesting experience last year. During our first (and only) practice match at the Colorado regional, our robot's arm drove itself past what we designed it for, and actually destroyed the shoulder joint. The sprocket was bent, acrylic cracked, chain slipped, c-channel bent, limit switches mangled, the whole 9 yards. We spent the next 2 and a half days of competition trying to get it in working order again. We determined that there was a loose crystal somewhere in the IFI control system, and during the special hybrid mode, it just caused those parts of the robot to freak out. We were allowed to rent one for the rest of the competition, but still had one close call where it did it again before we figured out what was causing the problem. Now I am really glad we have the cRIO, because NI has much higher QC than IFI IMO.

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After FRC opening ceremonies in Atlanta, we have to move the FLL tables back out onto Einstein. I nab the teams in Gallileo queueing to help with the hefty work. Of course, all the VIP's are still milling about, and we have to get these 8x8 tables through. Last year one kid started yelling, "Robot, robot coming through!" Oh yeah, that'll work.

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You should have asked the VIPs to help, remind them that they are on the competition floor after all.

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Last year at a mini practice regional before shipping that our team went to our center of gravity wasn't equal when the elevator went up to retrieve a ball from the over pass. It rocked back and forth and just about fell over :ahh:
i just about shaking and screaming and praying inside that it wouldn't . . . to our relief it didn't :yikes:

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2007 at FLR
On Friday the GRR pit crew and drive team when to get are lunch so we begin walking down a long empty hallway to where are team had the box lunch. And then just as we started down the long empty hallway the spark's pit crew (some, no not all 40 hahaha i love 1126) and drive team started to walk the towards us the tensions grew as both teams walked 6 wide towards each other until the inevitable happen, an epic showdown, it was the greatest nerd fight ever seen in first of course all in good fun and yes we wore are glasses

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This happened at an off-season event but it still counts.

At TNT this year during the all-night practice matches 2 of our mentors wanted to drive so we let them. They made it around to try to knock the ball off the overpass. They raised the scissor lift and the robot tipped over and was down for the count. It is mainly funny because during the whole season including before ship not once did a student driver tip the robot or even get that close to tipping it, but the mentors had no trouble doing it.

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Let's see mine is back in 07 with Rack n Roll, I kept trying to assure my advisor that when people where bench testing the banebots they were overloading them and we would be fine. Well... we weren't, I remember changing the gear plates in those about six to eight times between both gear boxes, strangely I remember it being fun. We started having races to see who could do it the quickest.

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One of the strangest moments in a competition for me has to be the Great Lakes Regional in 2006. In our teams second to last match before the alliance selection, the bugle went off but nothing happened. Then the foghorn noise they use to reset the match went off. We changed our battery and prepped our bot for the restart but it happened again. The match was restarted due to technical issues not twice, not three times, but eight times!

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Josh, Brandon, and myself proceeded to take the elevator to our 8th floor room. The elevator stopped, and knowing days inn's decor it looked just like the 8th floor. Josh and I caring on a deep philosophical on how much we hate vista walked 2 doors down on the right side, and attempted to open the door with our key card. After 3 attempts it didn't work, when we realized that we were standing in front of room 632, not 832, and Brandon was no were to been seen... we ran the flights of stairs only to find Brandon laying across the bed laughing his head off.

After the first day at GLR the team went to the cracker barrel; were after being seated we were given menus then asked what we wanted to drink, I promptly ordered a cheeseburger; ketchup, lettuce, and tomato, only. The waiter responded,"would you like that to drink?" "Yes we could blend it up" "Would you like a straw?" "Bendy" "Ok" "Actually if you could get me a coke"

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The strangest moment for me was at the Long Island Regional in 2006. It was during the finals. After two matches, both teams had one win each. The third match was a tie. The fourth match didn't count because the computer messed up the score of the autonomous, so the bonus and which team would be on offense/defense first was wrong. It went into the fifth match which an alliance won. So it took 5 matches to determine the winner of the regional.

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Thats a fantastic recipie for heart attack!

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Surrealist thing at a regional last year for me happened at Los Angeles. I'm a bit hazy on the specifics; I think there was a long downtime between matches or something and some appropriate music came on so a couple of mascots decided to start a conga line...and just about everybody joined in! It was so long it almost was a conga circle... Apart from that, all I remember was running around like a loon trying to keep up with the line for about ten minutes or so. It was epic. :D

Second most surreal thing ever would be seeing the announcer on the FTC Franklin field willingly wear my co-driver's teal duct-tape-and-VEX-metal tiara for a match. Well, that or seeing another one of the announcers wearing one of the Einsten's Daughter's bright pink hard hats.

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Hmm in the 2006 midwest regional at UIC in Chicago, IMSA rammed our robot in the home area repeatedly attempting to dislodge us from the area (We were a rookie team , our ramp was deployed and we had limited mobility). After the match IMSA drew a penalty for it and we discovered a few parts strewn next to our robot , we assumed they were ours and took them with. Back in the pit we heard a announcement from IMSA asking for the specific part we picked up apparently it was crucial to thier drive and had fallen of in thier attack. We were faced with returning the part to a team most of us felt a lot animosity towards or being unsporting and keeping it. I was team captain and decided to return it, much to the elation of the IMSA team and i remember me giving a very snarky, grudging "your welcome".lol. Ironicly IMSA placed ahead of us by one spot in the heats taking the best placing rookie team award from us :rolleyes: . It was made better by us winning the rookie inspiration award though :).

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hmmm, i've got to say my craziest robo moment happened because of the st louis 2008. for my senior prom, our group was the Robotics group and we had robo boys from around the country fly in to be our dates :) Grant Cox (217 Thunderchickens) got up in front of my entire senior class and junior class and beat-boxed like he'd known them all for years. we ended up taking pictures in front of this random chicken painting and robot painting too. . . . (of course, he was wearing lime green . . .) he was just as much fun at prom as he was at every regional and even atlanta. trust me, The Robettes have a ton of robo prom pictures! Mostly because of St Louis 2008!

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Back in 06 my first year with the team we were doing tha aim high game and we were testing are shoter. so i was told to get the balls after they were shot so i did. we emptyed all the balls we had and i was throwing the balls back to one of my team mates. any how the ball missed him and landed infront of him. any how some how the shooter started up when he bent down to get the ball and i was right infront of it. i got OWNED!! by the 9 balls that we had in the shooter at that time. I ended up with a bleeding nose.. it was not too fun for me but to the 9 team mates watching it, it was looking back on it is still funny.

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Oh that was so great! It seemed like forever since that hallway was so huge! Although I believe the "fight" your refering too consisted of us all sitting down and eating lunch together haha :D

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That is really cool. How did you guys set that up?

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noooooooooooooooooooo
that was after the fight
rember i stole you lunch

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At Worlds in 2003, there was an enormous conga line. It weaved across the floor of Reliant Stadium, and up into the stands. I can't really remember the specifics, I was pretty young at the time (6th grade). I know I've seen pictures of it floating around on the internet. But as far as Conga lines go, I've yet to see that one touched.

Found the picture!


(And trust me, the line stretches far beyond the edges of this picture)

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I have two. the first one was at davis when our team flipped team 100 and 997 in the quarter finals, after five rounds we were eventually defeated. classic david and galioth. the second one was at davis again in 2008, our speed controller malfunctioned and we did the entire match backwards, because the controller would go backwards and not forwards. we pivoted to hurdle, and still got two hurdles and some lines, man that was epic.

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I would have to say in Atlanta (I think 2005) I was late to lunch, and I found another teammate on the way to the food. When I went to talk to him somebody said he was playing 'Extreme Twister' with another team - when I got closer I saw the bloody nose.. From what I hear the other team still has a mark on their twister mat.

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My rookie year as a mentor at Atlanta 2005. Coming around a corner and coming face to face with Dean on his speeding segway. He stopped quickly, and after quick apologies, we both went our own ways. Afterwards, it was like, Hey that was Dean!...

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Those 5 elimination matches may not have been the strangest, but where definitely my most exiting experience in FIRST

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I remember two last year: the first was at Peachtree, our arm was powered by the van-door motor and had a positive mechanical stop. If we raised it hard against the stop and stalled the motor, the breaker would blow and the arm would "droop" (it took us a while to figure out what was going on) anyway, there were several early matches where we were heading down the stretch ready for a shot, and at the last second, instead of the ball flying over the overpass, the arm would just become limp. The audience usually responded with a big aaaawwwww...(we eventually fixed the problem)

The second was in a quarterfinal match on Archimedes. Another team (not sure who) decided that since they were unable to defend against our shooting, they would try to knock the ball off our vacuum funnel. They came in full speed and rammed the ball perpendicular to our bot. They bounced off like a cartoon and ended up on their side. We continued around the track and scored.;)

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Last year another robot (I can't remember which one) ran into the overpass and tipped backward. It fell into the forklift of our robot. I have no idea how, but somehow our drivers managed to set it down somewhat gently without getting tangled with it. It was incredible.

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yes it was, and to think we lost because of a penalty:( hopefully we will not have a repeat this year

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That's impressive. Our team thought there was no way anyone could build a successful vacuum... we were shocked to see your awesome robot pull it off.

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Dean Kamen almost never wears safety glasses

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2k2, Battlecry@WPI . . Finals.

190 grabs 2 goals and has both robots trying to pull them off of the hooks (190 used file cards to anchor to the carpet that year).

The front of the chassis of 190 was torn in half, causing shutdown of the robot for safety reasons.

Never once did it let go of those goals.

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In 2008 at the NJ regional there was tons of bots that would extend upwards, strike the overpass, and fall over. Most of the time there was a handy ally with a forklift to right them. It wasn't to uncommon....we almost got crushed by a falling bot haha.

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Davis 2007. 5 matches in the quarter finals was amazing.

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Last year, I was the driver. Our arm went all the way up, then came crashing down because one of the belts slipped off. The arm was useless, so I had to turn around and drive backwards to get laps. I was better driving backwards than forwards :P