Stupidest Programming Mistakes

[Jake M]

How about spending an hour trying to decipher a run-time error and systematically commenting all of our added code up to that point, only to later find we were compiling with the 2005 FRC settings instead of 2006?

Oh, and this isn't really a programming error, but I still think it's up there as stupid. In our third or fourth practice match last year, our robot suddenly started smoking out on the field. We had used a large ribbon cable to wire the camera and dozens of switches throughout the robot for use in autonomous mode to sense and pick up tetras, and cap them, which had been working perfectly. As it turns out, several of the spare wires, which was about half of the cable, that had been cut off from removed sensors and never removed from the electronics, and that included several five volts and grounds, had brushed up against the frame, which, simply put, melted the entire cable and fried our camera.