Scarriest 2003 moment

[K. Skontrianos]

What's the scarriest moment you've experienced in the 2003 season?

Mine would have to be a close call between the last match at Rutgers where both 25 and 87 teetered on top of the ramp, and having a qualification match which included 2 Ameyas in the same alliance..... That last match was most definitely a nail-bitter, but 2 Ameyas on the same team....WOW. Hahaha.

Try showing up to a regional and your crate wasn't there...thats scary....

[sanddrag]

We had a perfectly functioning autonoumous mode in the quarterfinals at LA. Then, our programmer changes something and loads it in right at the last minute before our semifinal match. There was no time to test it. Our programmer has been known to forget to change do something to the code causing catastrophic results (like not initializing at all). Luckily, what he changed only made a turn a tiny bit sharper for a dead straight run up the ramp into the wall of stacks. Wheew.

One funny moment was in a practice round at AZ when our brilliant primary driver forgot to turn on the robot before the match. Once auton mode was over, he realized it wasn't working so he ran onto the field in the middle of the match and flipped it on. The refs and judges were shocked and yelling at him to get off the field and never do it again.

Another funny time was right before the first quarterfinal match in LA. We were doing testing over at the practice field. On the back of our robot we have a flip up panel to cover the spot where the battery goes. We broke our battery hold down in our last qualifying match but I guess our programmer was not aware of that. He hit the button to start autonomous and the robot accellerated but the battery did not. The cover flipped up and the battery flew out the back, unplugged itself, slid across the floor and the robot rolled for a few feet without it. A guy from our partner team 968 came over and said "Did I just see a battery fly out the back of your robot?" BTW, thanks for making us a new hold down.

Oh, and another one. When we were testing over at the practice field our programmer had his switches set for the wrong side of the field. He is sitting on the floor with his laptop by where the field barrier would be. He pulls the trigger to start the run and the thing opens it's arms and comes rushing toward him. 122 lbs moving at 10fps is something you don't want to be in the way of. He was sitting on the floor and simply could not get up fast enough. He took a good hit but it kept on pushing for about 10 whole seconds until someone could come hit the breaker.

Another one is when we were testing down at 294's shop. We had a school laptop sitting on the floor and the robot runs autonomous and turns too wide and is heading strait for the laptop. We are all yeliing "STOP! STOP!" Someone finally gets to the disable switch on our OI and the robot stops about 2mm away from the frame blasting through the laptop.

Some of these stories might not really be scary but I just had to share them.

[GateRunner]

Off the top of my head, the scarriest moment for me was when I was human playing, had a pair of safety glass (just a little to big) on, and managed to nail them with the boxes. I actually managed to grab them and my last box, place it on the field, and get back to the pad in time *phew*

[josh_johnson]

When we were building the field, the only power saw we had was a battery powered circular saw. It would take about 2 hrs. to charge and would run down with ~5 mins. of use. While waiting for it to charge, I got the bright idea of using the robot battery to power it. We sent someone to the other room to go get some wire and another person wired it up. What I didn't realize until after the saw was turned on was that the wire used to power the saw was 24 gauge wire. The wire acted like a fuse and started melting and causing lots of smoke.

We were working on autonomous mode and I was following closely to the side of the robot. I had forgotten that I had programmed the wings to lower and when they did they smacked me in the head. The operator at the time quickly switched back to driver control and frantically pressed the button to raise the wing. He managed to raise it and then immediately lower it, therefore smacking me in the head again. He then raised the wing and unplugged the OI. This caused the wings to go back to the default state of wings down which hit me in the head for a third time in less than 30 secs.

We were testing our robot at 447's field and in going up the ramp we tripped the auto-resetting breaker controlling the right wheel. The robot then veered to the right and knocked down the plywood ramp wall as well as the 2 stacks of about 10-12 bins each on the other side of the wall. The robot ended up doing a nose dive from the 2 ft. tall platform and landing face first on the floor.

[Alaina]

We got flipped over at Nats (first time it happened ALL season) and our battery fell out...I guess it wasn't exactly scary. But it was definitely surprising.

But being in the finals at SVR with every capability of winning, and being part of the drive team, THAT is scary.

[KenWittlief]

this year - when our human player forgot to set the L/R switch for autonmode - the bot turned the wrong way and SLAMMED into the railing right in front of the judges table (our bot top speed is about 12mph)

a piece of the front (Skyway) wheel came off and hit one of the judges - we hit the railing so hard the robot controller reset, so auton mode started over again, backed up about 10 feet, turned right, and headed for the opponents player station at full speed.

Slammed into that so hard it left a 2 foot long gouge in the plexiglass wall.

We had talked about testing our robot, for robustness, before we shipped it, by running it full speed into a brick wall. We never actually ran that test, until the above mentioned incident at Buckeye.

Another scary moment - when we were testing auton mode at our site before shipping, and a stack of containers was knocked over, into the two containers on which my ThinkPad was sitting (holding ALL our SW on its harddrive - not backed up anywhere else).

The LCD was half knocked out of the laptop - took me half an hour to put the laptop backtogether. THEN I got the floppy drive out and backed up all my files - Figure I would NOT get a third chance :c)

[SarahB]

During our first quarterfinal match at Rutgers, our robot got flipped(we’re only 12” high!!) and our partner lost their battery connection in the first 30 seconds of the match . I thought all hope was lost, but then our opponents got disabled for intentionally knocking our partners battery off.

[MisterX]

Wow, I guess I'll be the first person to mention a scariest moment of 2003 with no robot directly involved. I am sure that most of my team would agree to this ( though I am not speaking for ALL of them) but the scariest time was the agonizing wait to see if the school would allow us to go to Houston. Then to be able to and have our teacher say we didn't deserve it and should let another team take our place! (He was right though and nobody argued his main point)

P.S. I hope whoever was the last team to enter Archimedies did GREAT!!!!!

[generalbrando]

Friday morning: St. Louis: Team 1020's pit. Another day, another 6 drive trains to try out. We've got a few pounds to lose in a half hour. We can do it. Everything's going good, right?

But something's not quite right...

"Amanda!?!?! BATTERIES!?!?!?! "

"(Explatives)..."


That was the scarriest moment for me, but I laugh about it all the time now. Amanda forgot the batteries in the hotel. She quickly brought them back and we had them for robot inspection.

[xavior06]

ARCH- i think this may have been w/ ramtech. but i dont remember. i was human player and we didnt want autonomous so i was taking my time, i put a stack of 3 our allie hada stack of 4 and i was to go over ana place my last box on their 4 to make a 5, i walked over and put it on, then i walked back to notice that the clock was at 13, so i dashed over and hit the pad just at 15!! WHEW... we still got control.

[xavior06]

more scary, being undefeated throughout nationals, 13th seed, and not getting picked in your division.. more shocking tho..

[dixonij]

Originally posted by K. Skontrianos
What's the scarriest moment you've experienced in the 2003 season?

Mine would have to be a close call between the last match at Rutgers where both 25 and 87 teetered on top of the ramp, and having a qualification match which included 2 Ameyas in the same alliance..... That last match was most definitely a nail-bitter, but 2 Ameyas on the same team....WOW. Hahaha.

Wow 87 was mentioned by someone other than me on the message boards. anyway that was a nail biter just like our philly match where we came close to winning but didnt...

[WakeZero]

The Kickoff meeting when Autonomous Mode was announced

[Chris Nowak]

I already posted this in another thread, but it was the last match in the galileo division, and I dont really remember who we were up against. At the beginning of the match, our opponents got most of the bins, so we had to clear out their scoring zone. We were pretty sure that whoever got on the ramp would decide the game, as there werent many bins around. Well, at the end, our robot is on the ramp and our two opponents are on the ramp. I dunno who are partners are, but instead of trying to push our opponnents off, they push US off of the ramp. At about 5 seconds remaining, we thought we were screwed, cuz our robot was touching theirs and we were off the ramp. However, I managed to maneuver the robot so that we ended up with only 3 wheels touching but our center of gravity was on the ramp so the fourth wheel lifted up. We ended up winning by one, with a score of like 58 to 57 or something.

What made this match so intense was the fact that we were #1 seed, and if we had lost this match we would have dropped significantly. Man, I almost had a heart attack at the end, because I was so close to touching our partner, which would have gotten us like 8 points for the match, which probably would have dropped us to around 5th or something. I almost made the call to get far away from the ramp at the end, to make sure we at least had the 25 points for our partner being on. Lucky I didnt!