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Unread 19-03-2013, 21:19
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zzzag zzzag is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Long Island, NY
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Re: Nightmare Repairs At Competition

I guess we've been lucky to not have any disastrous on-field collisions/accidents. The worst repair I can remember us needing to do was during inspection in 2011. We drew quite possibly the harshest of the inspectors, and he proceeded to pick apart everything that he thought was wrong with our robot (the rounded corners were "too sharp" and had to be duct taped, every single wire connection was "too loose", the chains were too loose or too tight). After close to fifteen minutes of this, one of our mentors, frustrated, went to tighten the (already carefully tightened both during build season and earlier that day) battery terminals on the PD Board - and the entire bolt snapped off.

Due to our design that year, our power distribution board was on the lowest level of the robot (on our drive base), and a second board with all of our pneumatics equipment was mounted directly above it.

Fortunately, we had an extra board with us, and it only took about 45 minutes to reach through the chains and transfer all the wires from the old board into the new board.

The broken board now sits in our shop as a reminder to all team members to never let that mentor tighten any part of the robot
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