[Karibou]

That's a fantastic story! It's really similar to a column that I wrote for our school newspaper at the end of my sophomore year. Unfortunately, I don't think that I have an electronic copy of the text any more (If I find it, I'll post it), but there is one that I wrote this year that I can share. It's not a "FIRST changed my life" narrative, but I think that some FIRST-ers could relate to it...

Originally Posted by Pit Stop

When you build something that’s big, complex and expensive, like a robot, you hope it doesn’t break.

Unfortunately, sometimes it does.

I attended a competition at Grand Valley State University last weekend with the Gearheads robotics team. When we arrived, we knew that we had some debugging to do, but didn’t expect any glaring problems.

Unfortunately, we expected wrong.

The telescoping elevator on our robot wasn’t working. The lights on the pneumatics were blinking and changing colors accordingly, but air wasn’t moving. We couldn’t hang tubes--the primary way of scoring points in the game--without the elevator. At least the drive train was working. We could still play defense.

Unfortunately, that broke too.

A bolt came loose mid-match, and a wheel axle slipped out. All they could tell from the driver station was that half of our drive train was out—there was no way of knowing that by continuing to try and move forward, the problem was getting worse.

When the robot came back to the pit, we assessed the wreckage: everything but the wheel itself was damaged. The sprocket assembly—two sprockets welded to either side of a hub—was unusable. One of the two sprockets was bent and the teeth were in various states of scratched, bent and missing chunks. We did have a spare hub and spare sprockets, but they weren’t welded together. We sent a teammate to the machine shop on the other side of campus to get the weld done.

Unfortunately, we had already missed our next match.

Fortunately, it gave us time to work on the elevator. A helpful robot inspector came to our pit and helped us realize that we were using a 24-volt valve instead of a 12-volt one. Oops. Changing that made it work.

Unfortunately, the hub still wasn’t back.

We sent a parent to find out what was up. She returned 15 minutes later, saying that the welding machine had jumped and that a sprocket was now missing a tooth. However, she said they could try and remove the damaged sprocket from the original hub and try and put a new one on. We sent her back with both.

In the meantime, we were trying another possible fix: taking two wheel hubs from spare wheels and sandwiching them together with two more sprockets using good ol’ nuts and bolts. Ten minutes of ratcheting and two sore wrists later, we had a hub that was usable. It was by no means the best fix, but we had already missed our next match by 15 minutes. The current match, 75, was being delayed because of an error on the field. Our next match was 76.
We put the entire assembly back on in five minutes. We were on the field in seven, arriving literally just in time for the match.

Unfortunately, it was our last match of the event. There was no chance that we were being picked for the elimination rounds, but our robot was finally working. My eyes weren’t leaking saltwater because we weren’t picked, but because we did the impossible.

In the words of one of our mentors as I returned to the pit to clean up the carnage, “This is why you never give up.”