Any funny stories during the season?
 

Hi. I was wondering if any of you have any funny stories from the season.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

-during the early testing phases of our robot we had just finished our drive train and it's code was being tested. the lead programmer let me hang on to the back of our drive base while he drove it up and down the halls of our school, it was lots of fun, video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG2IQU0Vqp0
-about a day or 2 before the end of build season my team finally tested our robot's intake roller. on the first try it easily gets control of the ball, but also stalls the motor...about 5 seconds later flames start shooting from the motor and people yelling to "TURN IT OFF!"

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

One of the refs this year at the Detroit District was talking about how he almost got hit pretty hard by a ball back in 2006 (the ball whizzed by him, missing him by about 1 or 2 inches.).
Not too long after he told me that, during elimination rounds, Team 67 kicked a ball out of bounds. That renegade ball hit that referee. :D

I just found the whole context of the situation to be hilarious.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

These are mostly programming-related:

We had the Jaguars on our practice robot hooked up via CAN, and I had a laptop hooked up to the serial interface with BDC-COMM open (the CAN troubleshooting utility for all you non-programmers). I had the laptop sitting on top of the robot, which was on the ground. Curious to see how the program works, I typed "50" into the speed box and pressed enter...less than a second later I was chasing the robot and laptop across the lab trying to type "0" while jogging sideways at 5 ft/s. :D

One of our senior programmers was having trouble getting a camera feed to the driver station. After he had been working on it for about thirty minutes, I took a look under the camera...sure enough, the Ethernet cable was unplugged. Intent on teaching a lesson about checking the simple things first (and finding the situation rather hilarious), we let him reinstall the dashboard software and reimage the cRIO before informing him of the real problem. :D

Three mentors were standing at the scale, weighing the crate we had just finished building. While the crate was on the scale, one of the mentors stepped inside it; the scale operators could not see this from their angle. It was hilarious watching three engineers scratch their heads while trying to figure out how they underestimated the crate weight by over 200 lbs. :D

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

There were so many renegade balls at Wayne State. :P I still love the ball we shot straight over the drivers station. The kick wasn't even full power!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

From what i heard, your robot kicking at full power will never end up on the field lol

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

That was amazing. I love your kicker just because of its awesome power.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

This is very true, even with the current limits in our code, full power kicking will always either bounce very hard off the wall or bounce right over it.

Our autonomous is worse though. Our coding in Auton winds the kicker longer. If we forget to dial down before the match it always ends up kicking out of the field!

Twisting a garage door spring was a genius idea. Sadly I am not sure who actually came up with the idea. The electromagnet is pretty cool too. So much more fun than pneumatics!

Dan Kimura (field manager at Wayne State and programmer for 469) told us that if we could kick over the driver station and through one of the gym doors we would get bonus points. Our driver was so infinitely tempted to try. :D

Apparently we are going to show off our robot at a couple of high schools in our area. We are currently planning to find out the exact power we need to kick into the baskets from about half court!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Made from leftover video from our Chairman's video:

http://www.youtube.com/user/rivercit.../1/sYs-b9YjsBI

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Psh i think you should figure out a full court shot, haha but seriously congrates on figuring out such a powerfull kicker!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

It's limited to the point that it won't arc that far. We are too afraid of destroying the springs to do that!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

4 days before ship date, we drove our robot to fast over the bump, flipped it and bent the aluminum holding our wheels and motors. The next day was spent re-building and reinforcing the frame. Wasn't funny at the time but in retrospect, it saved us from having to rebuild our robot at the competition.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

That's a funny story! It can't be true! I've never seen a robot move 4 days before ship date! :rolleyes:

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Another fun story I would like to share didn't really happen this year, but I was told about it this year (by a couple of volunteer buddies I used to work with). Back at a regional when FIRST didn't really have as high of a safety standard as they do now, a couple of volunteers were on the field doing some field maintenance.

Well, the match happened to start,

while they were still on the field.

Needless to say, they both learned about their hidden track and field talents that day and got out of there faster than a renegade ball kicked by 818 ( ;) ). Thankfully, nobody got hurt, and I am very doubtful something like this would happen nowadays because of better safety practices. I'm very sure everyone involved learned their lesson about paying attention.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

My FIRST year I was drafted to program the robot. I said sure, why not? Well everyone on the team was new as well as myself and we had no idea about calibrating victors, or using a dongle. And of course none of us thought to put the robot up on blocks before turning it on. Well we flipped it on and it proceeded to spin at full speed. Desks were flying all over, and another mentor almost got his legs broken when he tried to jump on its back. FINALLY another mentor managed to recall that if he unplugged the driver station that the robot would stop. Good times!