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!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Well this didn't really happen during the season but it did happen at the Silicon Valley Regional. Because one of our former members of the team always liked to ask the pit announcers for a flux capacitor or something strange like that, we decided to continue his tradition by asking for a "Neumatic Programming Wrench". Not only did the pit announcers allow us to ask this, we were given one early the next morning. Yes, a "Neumatic Programming Wrench". I can't remember which team gave it to us, but it was basically a wrench with neumatic tubing taped to it along with a computer cable. I couldn't stop laughing at the time.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

when our kicker was tested the drivers kicked the ball when i was doing the bill of materials on the computer and the ball touched the turn off button of the computer and all the bill of materials was no longer existing. it was funny

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

At the Buckeye Regional we asked Pit Admin to send out a request for a flux capacitor, and when they did we had someone bring us a piece of spongy foam. We then wrote on it and christened it the "Fluff Capacitor." We also got some candy, which we said would provide 1.21 gigawatts worth of caffeine.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

It was one of Al's few simple designs. He came up with many other designs and we kept telling him, thats a nice design, but way to complex. He shows us this idea and all we could say was brilliant! I am jacking the robot this summer to learn to program and lets just say the length of kick migh be tested.

I remember when we were prototyping the design and kicking some balls. One of the kicks we tried sent the ball about 20 feet in the air, and that was about 5 to maybe 10 feet out from where the ball left the ground. To bad we were inside so we dont know exactly how far that could have gone. There were many of blasts that would go 10+ feet above the ground when it would hit the wall 30 feet away. To bad we couldnt have the follow through that the prototype had, stupid bumper rule :mad:

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Imposhibibble!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

At regionals where we stay overnight, there have been reports of ice wars.

Not that I would take part in waking up at 5 AM to throw ice into the driver's room because their room had a doorbell. That would be crazy... *innocent*

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

On the way back from the Dallas regional, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant for dinner and they served shrimp with the eyes still on there. So one girl at my table goes to the bathroom and we put a shrimp head in her rice and she comes back and doesn't see it until her fork hits it. Then someone puts the head in her drink and we fish it out in front of her. Later someone taps her on the shoulder and she turns around to have a shrimp head shoved in her mouth. And the waitress was in on everything with us.

Last year, some people were in the metals shop using a drill press. Two people who know what they're doing and a newbie (me). So one of the kids is getting mad at the castor that he's drilling axle holes into and he playfully bangs his head on the wall. Less than a minute later some clear-yellowish fluid starts leaking out his nose. It wasn't a drip, but like a faucet on full bast. So it leaks for about a minute and the three of us stand there until I ask if he's been sniffing the cutting oil or it was his brain. And then we all burst into laughter wondering what the heck has happened to the sanity of our team.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

That is beautiful.

This isn't related to robotics but there is a computer and network administrator class at my high school with only a few kids in each hour. During each of these hours there is also a large class of students learning programming of different sorts and there is a single class for accounting. Every time there is a substitute teacher, one of the students in the first hour class asks the sub to remind my friends and I who show up later in the day to swap out the "Hydrogen Moleculizers" in all of the computers. When one of us is notified of this important task we all become extremely serious about getting it done. This has been going on all year and yet not a single substitute has noticed we were joking.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

A quick background info thing: our new shop has two cages detached from a large central open area. One of these cages is for storage, the other for machining. Also, due to a recent move to our current location and the onset of build season our work space is an organizational disaster (AKA, it looks like the inside of my locker =P).

Ok, so one evening I'm using the circular sander to clean up the edge on a few pieces of a peer award. I am not paying enough attention and I try to grind the piece using the far edge of the disc. The little piece of metal in my hand promptly shoots out of my hand. Thankfully no one was hurt...in fact no one even knew where the object had landed. I then spend a good 15 minutes searching the floor for the piece. I end up finding it outside the machining cage about fifteen feet from the sander.

Now as you'd imagine I'd be very wary around the sander that day, making sure to follow all the imaginable precautions, right. Wrong! Something in my exhausted head told me it would be a good idea to try grinding the square face of a 2x2x0.125 aluminum plate. Ten seconds later "CLANG". I had once again lost my grip and the plate was nowhere to be found. The search begins again, and this time I'm thoroughly confused. Not being able to find a tiny peer award piece on the ground is one thing, but a 2x2 plate. That's a bit odd. Finally I was describing what had happened to one of our mentors (college student). We go over and take a side panel off the sander and sure enough the plate is inside the sander. the metal was so thin it got sucked inside the machine.

I laughed...hard.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

The last couple of years I usually get some of the students who want to learn to use battery powered hand tools, circular saw, drill, jigsaw, etc.. and build the parts of the practice field that we use.

This year we had successfully avoided wood screwing boards into the linoleum school floor or sawing off parts of the drafting tables we use instead of the sawhorses.

However I walked in the room a bit late one evening and 4 or 5 of the students were just finishing drilling the 4th of 4 1"+ holes in the 4X4's of the tower for the pipes. I knew they had been working on them a while. As I walked toward them I smelled hot wood and noticed that big wood bit turning in reverse. They had drilled the first 3 and most of the 4th with the drill running backwards. Quite amusing! In addition, these were the 4X4's that were cut 6" short and we had to add 6".

I love to laugh and learn at the same time! That's why I work on wood and leave the robot to others! Measure twice and cut once!

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

I had once made a funny-looking assembly consisting of a rolling car attached to a rod of slotted aluminum chassis by a spring. I then tried to drill a hole in the car without clamping anything down. After I inevitably lost my grip, the part climbed up the drill press, spun around a few times, then was ejected forcefully into the floor, compressing the spring and causing it to hop 12' across the shop. Fortunately no one was in the area when this occurred - both for their safety, and for my dignity. :p

The first time I drilled a hole in the piece of polycarbonate, I had the drill running backwards. It took about sixty seconds to get through 1/8" of plastic. I remember thinking out loud, "man this stuff is tough!," when in reality I wasn't drilling through the material: I was melting through it. :p

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

This year we were teaching a sophomore how to drill through a piece of lexan polycarbonate sheet that we were using for our electronics board. We had the spot where we were drilling just off of the table so the drill bit wouldn't damage the table (we had done this countless times and nothing ever happened). What we hadn't realized was that the lexan sheet was really an acrylic sheet (20 times weaker than the lexan that we used in years past) and the piece cracked completely off. We were shocked that the piece cracked off like it did. We now tease him about the piece that broke off.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

Today at Troy, one of the referees was so fed up with getting hit by balls that he taped a sign on his back that said "I am not a goal!"

Looks like getting hit by balls is more common that I thought :D

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

In San Diego, our pits were horrible. Junk and tools were lying around everywhere, trip hazards were a must, and our power tools were plugged in and exposed. Furthermore, our safety captain and our coach on the drive team had tripped over our robot cart... 2 minutes later, a safety advisor gave us safety tokens for "plugging in our batteries correctly"

While testing different geometries for our kicker plater, our mentor happened to be watching. We pulled the kicker back, put a ball in place, and let it go... It hit him straight in the face at which point he said "it looks like we're using THAT one"

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

At Philly, during a qualification match, a robot began smoking. And by smoking, I dont mean a trickle of smoke, I mean a serious amount billowing out. The team refused to E-Stop their robot in autonomous, due to the penalty, so it continued smoking. The robot was also in their offensive zone, so they could hardly see it. When Tele-Op starts, they run to the controls, and try to drive it. When they realize that it is smoking, they start jamming their E-Stop button. Nothing happens. They are all like WTF!!!!! Our team and other members other people on the stands start yelling, and finally the refs E-Stop the robot, and end the game. A volunteer runs onto the field with a fire extinguisher looking dangerously ready to pull the trigger. The smoke soon stops coming out, and then the team runs on to the field to see what the issue was. They fixed it, and they won the match.

Re: Any funny stories during the season?
 

I was there too, that was 816, Anomoly, our sister-team, so to say. The greatest part about the incident was that the team had an impressive track record of blowing up their electronics. What happened this time was that their digital sidecar shorted the 12v 20amp input power to the pwm outputs, and sent 20 amps of power through the PWM wires, causing every single pwm wire to burst into flames. They ended up fixing it right there on the field, played that round and won. in fact, they became captain of the 8th alliance too!!

Someone at the Philly regional also asked for a flux capacitor and a cooling condensor rod. At our previous competition in Baltimore I asked for the fictional piston return spring.

There is this shy redhead on our team. He is bright and excellent at CAD, though. On our bus ride home from the Chesapeake regional, a kid steals another student's shoe off her foot,and tossed it to the front of the bus. A different kid picks up the shoe. He quickly turns and throws this shoe back to the back of the bus. Now if you think the guy who threw the shoe at President Bush was good, you haven't seen this kid. This shoe does not flop in the air. No, it spirals toe-first, like a football. So this shoe is traveling at mach 2 towards the back of the bus, and out of sheer dumb luck, the redhead leans out into the hall of the bus, and the second he did, BAM! The shoe nails him right in the nose, and he starts to bleed. We start calling to our coach, who is in the very front of the bus, talking to the other chaperone. After a good 30 seconds he stands up and says "Can't you see I'm trying to have a conversation here?" I scream "Look at all the blood!" and our coach turns around, notices, and his jaw just drops to the floor.


At the philadelphia regional, we became notorious for our highly defensive robot. It has a top speed of 15+ feet/sec, has a custom-built chassis that puts our center of gravity 3 inches off the ground, and in the middle of our robot, and a ground clearance of just 1 inch, yet we can travel over the bump at full speed without damaging the bot. This thing was so powerful at blocking that when we got up to speed to charge another robot, the entire crowd would quiet in anticipation.

One match, I missed the robot and drove at full speed right into the side wall of the field, where a referee who wasn't paying attention was standing just on the other side. We hit the wall so hard the entire field shook, including driver stations. We startled the referee so much he nearly jumped into the stands! The game announcer told us not to scare the referees anymore.

We scored a headshot on the head referee with a soccer ball.

We ended up flipping a robot which was top seed after they said they were un-tippable. The head referee knew they were boasting about their "un-tippable robot" and we walked away with no penalties. When asked, he said it was quite entertaining to watch.

Today, I found that another team that was there made a facebook group dedicated to our robot! Truly the funniest thing I have ever seen!



Also, what luck is it that I randomly found this thread and posted a response to the captain of our alliance in the finals!