What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?

[DarrinMunter]

At the Championships, right after the B.E.P. concert we lost a rookie freshmen.
He went to use the restroom, and when we came back in the arena, it was clearing out. Our team had already left, and when we did a head count, found he was missing. It took about 45 minutes for us to find him, on the back far side of the staduim outside. At our end of season banquet, he did win for best rookie team member, and for a prize and we gave him a compass and a whistle.

[PayneTrain]

What is wrong with Team 422's robot in this video?

If you answered "Some idiot freshman in the pit forgot to reconnect the radio before the match, causing the team to lose a match they should have won, boosting them from 4th alliance captain to 2nd alliance captain, allowing them to meet 2753 in the finals and get destroyed instead of the semifinals," then I would respond with "No, I don't know what you are talking about. No, no, no, it wasn't me, I swear! I just personally check the radio before every match now and will continue to do so for no reason at all."

[philso]

My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piq4VSKoy54

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by philso

My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piq4VSKoy54

Did that just hit your roller claw? That's really kinda funny...unfortunate, but funny.

[philso]

Yes, they left the claw down instead of flipping it back out of the way . My boys started to cry and walked out of the convention hall after the second time it happened. If I recall correctly, only a few mini-bots from teams like 118 could beat it.

[funstuff]

Not my own, but there was a rookie team I ran into at the 2004 Sacramento that had not realized that there was a ship date until they got an email the Friday before. The entire team thought they had until the competition to build. They had to build a crate and robot in ~3days. They called it the 72 hour robot. I believe we referred to it as "the plywood box with wheels." It was mostly wood, with a pair of window motors direct mounted to the two drive wheels. They had taped paper signs onto the sides with their team number and school name. The team ended up as an alliance captain that year, if I remember correctly.

Of my own teams' "rookie" mistakes:

• Not removing our safety strap that held down a spring-loaded arm of our only scoring mechanism in 2005 during a Quarter Final match
• Several battery attachment/mounting issues that resulted in a dead robot
• A robot cart so tall and narrow it was a hazard
• Not including a good regulating mechanism between our hopper and shooter in 2006. Very few balls were fired when intended.
• Wheels with so much friction that the drive motor fuses tripped within a second of driving. We thought it was a communication issue. Hint: 1/2" thick neoprene is not a great wheel tread.

[ehfeinberg]

Oh I forgot one.

In 2008 two kids were checking our electronics board with this little mini flash light. Long story short, they forgot to take it out and left it in the drive train. We were really confused when our robot wouldn't move, and why there was a bright light shining from the bottom of the robot. This cost us an elimination match.

Yeah, we are on our game. Still not too many 'rookie' mistakes here.

[GaryVoshol]

We left a parent-mentor behind at a rest area in the middle of the night. Counted the students getting back on the bus, but not the adults. So we called his cell phone to tell him we noticed he wasn't there and we'd be back - only to hear the phone in his bus seat start ringing.

[rsegrest]

Rookie year 2008 Overdrive...

So...imagine...here we are, very first practice match FRC Overdrive. 25 PantherBots screaming in joy as their robot takes off and does its 'drive straight, turn left' routine. Make it through the match and the refs disable the bots...

Two student drivers and the robot coach (an actual team coach/mentor) go out on the field to get their bot...as the students are carrying the robot off the field a referee walks over to the robo coach with a double-handful of nuts and bolts and says, 'I think you lost these...' *robo coach accepts offering of bolts, picks one randomly, hands it back to the ref and says* "No, this one isn't ours..."

Needless to say we haven't forgotten the Lock-tite or nylocks since...

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Samwaldo

We always ask the freshmen for:
A aluminum magnet
A bucket of Steam
Left handed screw driver
Left handed wrench

We sometimes get one who looks for 10 minutes and then begins to ask mentors where they can find one.

At work last week, a couple of us were making a run out to retrieve something that was left by one of the machine shops. As we're leaving, my boss says "Hey, while you're out there, tell the shop that we need a stringer stretcher." (A board stretcher is a close approximation.) I start cracking up as soon as my coworker is out of sight around a corner, make some comment to my boss about sending newbies after the metric left-handed crescent wrench, and head out.

We quickly found the item we needed to retrieve, and I waited for a few minutes before my coworker came out of the shop. "They don't know what a stringer stretcher is." At which point, I filled him in that he'd been pranked. I think we got a couple of the other guys with a similar mission later.

[Tem1514 Mentor]

Originally Posted by Samwaldo

We always ask the freshmen for:
A aluminum magnet
A bucket of Steam
Left handed screw driver
Left handed wrench

We sometimes get one who looks for 10 minutes and then begins to ask mentors where they can find one.

What! no bucket of Sparks.

That is always a good one to ask for during a regional. The worst part someone will try and help to full fill the request

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by Tem1514 Mentor

What! no bucket of Sparks.

That is always a good one to ask for during a regional. The worst part someone will try and help to full fill the request

I can get you some cold ones.

[Gregor]

We may or may not have wired the DC-DC converter backwards today.

[ehfeinberg]

Originally Posted by Gregor

We may or may not have wired the DC-DC converter backwards today.

At least you didn't switch the polarity of your battery. Blink... Blink... Poof. There goes 10 jaguars. (Happened to us a week ago)

[MysterE]

It's 2011 and we are at the Bayou. Our autonomous had been giving us fits as our line trackers refused to, well, track. Finally, frustrated with the code, our programmer sets our robot to move forward based on time. I am recording next to the field with a video camera.

The starting bell sings. . . And our robot hurdles across the field. . . Backwards. It pile drives an opposing team into their front wall and they get hung up against it. I can't even remember the penalty they had to assess for that. I can't remember winning or losing the game. . . I do remember winning the regional though :-)