[JamesCH95]

In 2004, while vying for a regional win at Palmetto, a missed decimal place in a revised autonymous code caused our robot to impact the other player station at full speed (in the next year or two FIRST started putting velcro on the player station IIRC). This caused one of our transmissions, the universally disappointing 3/8 Bosh drill transmission, to fall apart. We thought we fixed it, but not quite. In the next few minutes our alliance captain smoked a motor or two on their robot's arm, making them basically unable to score. A few seconds into the 3rd match of the finals our transmission failed entirely, turning the final match into a snooze-fest that the other alliance won handily, as the chassis driver I was heart-broken, as was much of our team.

To take a step back, we were the 8th seeded alliance (after much in-picking in the top 8) and managed to knock out the 1st and 5th seeded alliances convincingly. Sometimes luck just doesn't go your way...

Though this was my most frustrating experience with FRC, I wouldn't call it bad (just less good I guess?) Our team had gone from 2nd-to-last in the standings to one of the top-scoring robots during eliminations, and while I/we felt that we could have (and should have) won, it was a strong lesson in graciously accepting a loss and always trial-running antonymous code before putting the robot out on the field.