What hath we wrought? 2016 Horror Stories

[OccamzRazor]

Originally Posted by Bryce Clegg

It probably was you guys, it seemed like your robot successfully scaled almost every single match. Your robot was an amazing one to watch and compete against. I remember that at Asheville we were playing defense against you, and your robot hit the ground very hard, at the point where most robots would break. Then, you guys fixed the robot and won the next match.

Gotta have a solid frame for a game like this and for antics like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEKWdsOhAdY

Yes, the other team was slightly terrified we were stuck in high gear at the wrong moment without bumpers and nearly landed on them.

They also learned to keep the battery strapped in a bit better since it disconnected and flew from the robot.

We did drop to the floor once from about 4 ft from the ground during testing but I can't remember any other serious drops on the field. Most of the climbing failures just resulted in a slow and uneventful descent. I was more worried about drive components cracking than frame this year.

[fargus111111111]

I'm slightly surprised BillFred has't posted his sign from Palmetto in this thread, for a while the CDF was not an option, they were ALL broken! Granted this was before HQ had the metal reinforcements put in them, but still, 1/2 inch polycarb is pretty hard to break. Other stories of motors releasing their magic smoke, I'm sure there are plenty, as well as connection losses because of wires jarring loose, I know we had that problem in the finals in Palmetto. We also had a minor issue with our 3d printed drive pullys, we used an elongated version of the rhino track this year with some Breco-flex belts and originally we 3d printed pulleys for them to run on, needless to say, those didn't make it through one competition, we replaced the 4 corners with metal pulleys for our second regional.

[BrendanB]

1058's tougher times this year:

Reading Match 1

Our climber is a double linkage designed so the gas shocks keep it down before a piston pushes them past the center point so they take over and extend up. We some drop tests and drive tests over defenses and it worked fine. First match in autonomous the climber extends upwards after driving over the rockwall and we all had this moment of, "This is very bad". The root cause was a knot of surgical tubing was preventing the assembly from collapsing all the way. We adjusted the knot, added a small strip of painters tape as a temporary fix, and added a piston lock as a permament solution for the rest of the season. We also destroyed about 8 halves of the AM 6" Pnuematic Tire Hubs over the course of the event. We had plenty of spares but we knew we had to start making our own hubs asap. This meant our addition of a shooter was delayed by an event so we were testing and tuning it during the New England Championship.

Any match on Caver

Our robot had about 80 official matches on it by the time St. Louis rolled around. We added our working shooter at the previous event and made a better intake for Champs hoping to see our cycling improve. Little did we know most of our matches there had some major failure or breakdown leaving us disabled or limping on the field. The plates holding our gearboxes had bent into the robot so we threw the gearbox chains the first match. Our climber had be used so much that after we scaled the tower the hook snapped and sent the robot the ground. We sheared the bolts on our metal hubs. Our pnuematic system acted funny so one or two shots barely lifted the ball out of the robot. We had some miscommunication on changing some autonomous modes (completely my fault) so we didn't fully cross some defenses. We had some odd electrical problems leading to brownouts. It was a rough event knowing we had potential to do so much more but it was the point where Stronghold was getting the better of our robot.

Mainely Spirit

We had some odd pnuematics issues later in the day where near the end of each match we had no air left in our system but once we enabled in the pit the compressor turned on immediately. When we got home we diagnosed the compressor was shot. After the fourth or fifth cycle of needing air it refused to turn on even with a signal from the PCM.

Stronghold is the hardest game I've played and I'm amazed how well our machine has held up over 136 matches plus practice and demos.

[EmileH]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

1058's tougher times this year:

Mainely Spirit

We had some odd pnuematics issues later in the day where near the end of each match we had no air left in our system but once we enabled in the pit the compressor turned on immediately. When we got home we diagnosed the compressor was shot. After the fourth or fifth cycle of needing air it refused to turn on even with a signal from the PCM.

Stronghold is the hardest game I've played and I'm amazed how well our machine has held up over 136 matches plus practice and demos.

And how could we forget at Mainely Spirit when our practice robot, 8501/1056 sheared one of our gearbox output shafts in our second to last qualification match. Because of this we epoxied the shaft back together and had to sit out our last qualification match while we waited for the shaft to dry. We ended up still being the #7 alliance captain with 5687 and 910 (319's practice robot's drivebase) and making it to semifinals, beating the #2 seed with 319 and 133, two crazy powerful robots despite numerous electrical faults. We tacked those up to a loose PCM power cable that shorted out every match, eventually burning up the 20 amp PDP fuse that powered the VRM, and subsequently, the radio.