[BBray_T1296]

This reminds me of a great story, that brings tears to my eyes as it was such a great memory.

2012 we competed at Texas Robot Roundup in the summer offseason. After lurking on Chief Delphi there was concern that there was only 23 teams signed up, and for proper eliminations you need at least 24. (before we knew everyone had brought a practice robot too!)

We (team 1296) offered to bring our practice bot, but it was in several crates, already having been entirely dismantled for the season.

We show up on friday with our competition bot, the tiniest toolbox imaginable, and bins and bins of robot parts, from critical (cRIO) to useless (Huge sticks of polycarbonate beam stock why?:->why not?) with the intent to build the practice bot there. We also stole the bumpers off our 2011 robot to have a second set (and shoddily taped red "7"s over the "6"s on them [1297])

We had some technical and mechanical issues (because our robot stupidly had 16 motors on it) on our main comp bot, so we spent all of friday getting it up to snuff. At this point, we still had no idea that there was actually enough robots. We gathered everything we had, and brought bin after bin of parts, a welded frame, motors, metal bits, power tools, rat's nest of leftover wires, and tons of crap, into the hotel with us that night.

The front desk clerks looked terrified. We assured them it would be "OK" and crammed into the elevator.

Overnight, in a hotel room, with 8 people (and a robot!) crammed into a room too big for 4, we constructed, salvaged, programmed, and tested a robot with barely more than a laptop and a single screwdriver.

We showed up Saturday morning and to everyone's surprise, we did it! it even had working (define working) autonomous.

It was basically a mecanum kitbot on wheels with a ramp lowerer (which I promptly destroyed by accident) and competed.

I was pretty proud of our extreme procrastination. (we didn't know it was due until the day before!)