Use Velcro on your Control Board!!

[Faith]

Our controller went flying once too. It never hit the ground, being held up by the competition port, but it was DEFINITELY a surprise. We had been warned ahead of time that if it was disoriented by the team coming at us, we could step forward and move it, but we weren't expecting it to actually come off the station. Nothing was damaged, luckily, but velcro was put on first thing after the match was done.

[Corey Oostveen]

Yes there is no penalty for saving the control board from hitting the ground.

Everything happened so fast that I did not even realize I stepped up across the line and put it back before hybrid was completely over. I cant believe that only one of our joy sticks broke. Here is the video of when Our control board fell you cant see it happen but the announcer says stuff about it, and you will see our manipulator not functioning until halfway through the match.

http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv...p?matchid=4961

Corey

[daf]

Might be a stupid question... but what side of the velcro should be put on the bottom of the control board?

[daf]

Ummm..just kidding....just read the first post of the thread lol

[thefro526]

I know this is a bit late but, regardless of how much your control board weighs or the shape of it, put some Velcro on it. It will not hurt anything and just make sure you mount it securely enough to your control board. Also we have had our controls knocked off and knocked other peoples controls off and I will say this, screw the penalties if there is a robot speeding at your wall that looks like it may be out of control.

When we would go out for a match I usually held my hand out about 4" away from our control board if I saw a robot coming. I would ask the ref before doing this and as long as you don't touch the controls you should be fine. Also don't hesitate to save your control board. Control Board > 10 points.

[bigbeezy]

The exact same thing happened to us in a match at Florida. they slamed the wall and our controls feel to the ground shattering our arm joystick. due to the shattered joystick our tower got stuck in the up position and we had no way of lowering it... so we were stuck in one quadrant for the entire match unable to do anything.

by the way we did have Velcro on our control board when this happened.

Now we still use the Velcro, but we also clamp our controls to the table so hopefully this will not happen again. By a shear chance of luck one of our mentors that very morning had us grab a spare joystick from our shop so that we would have a spare. The funny thing is that we had laughed at the time...

[Golto]

We had this happen at the CT regional. I was in the remote Robocoach station, and our alliance partner came crashing into the wall, sending the controls of the station 3 team flying. They stoppe, and the other robots were coming...next thing we knew, there was a pileup.