Programming goofs!

[Matt Krass]

Ok everyone, Week 1 is past, Week 2 is coming, and people are nervous about it. This is normal, and I think it might be fun, and helpful, if we started throwing out some great 'war stories' of silly programming mistakes we've made. I'm not talking about a misplaced semicolon, or forgetting to invert one motor, I mean the big stuff, the kind of stuff that you look back on and think "I can't believe I did that!"

I'll go first:

In 2003, I was a freshman in high school, programming the Stack Attack robot for 263 in PBASIC. It was the first year of autonomous, and with purely loop counters and some rough guesstimates on numbers our robot drove forward, turned in a wide 180 degree arc, and deployed two pistons on either side of the robot as 'wings'. Then it charged the ramp and tried to drag as many bins over to our side of the field as it could. One match I tweaked the turn so it would be a bit straighter.... I overdid it a bit. The robot whirled around so it was pointing at the ramp at a sharp angle instead of head-on. The pistons deployed, and the robot took off, and crushed the piston. I mean wrecked, it took a substantial amount of time just to dig it off the robot. At that point the team teased me relentlessly about it. Later on, we all signed the piston and it's been a staple of the robotics room at Sachem for years. I'll see if I can track down a photo of it later and add it to this thread.

Ok people, hit me with it, what silly mistakes have you made while wielding the keyboard?