What hath we wrought? 2016 Horror Stories

[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.