Most Unfortunate Incidents

[Zyik]

973 has had some pretty bad luck in years past.

Cal Games 2007, eliminations.

A team on the red alliance had an autonomous mode that would ram the other side. This appeared to be intentional, as it wouldn't just go forwards, it would race forwards, turn, and race forwards again aiming for the blue alliance robots. One of the several times they hit just they snapped a weld or two on our ramps, forcing us to only use one for the match. That made it so we could only lift one robot, instead of two, and lost us the match.

Wasn't the first time we'd lost a ramp that way, and if it had happened that way at a regional I would have been more upset. The other few times we had lost a ramp was from playing defense, not sitting helplessly in autonomous. However, Cal Games is just an off-season, so while I didn't like what happened, I don't worry about it.

Silicon Valley 2008.

Somehow we managed to break two wheels. I have no idea how, and last time I asked, no one knew. It wasn't like the inside got chewed up, but it looked like it had dented from the outside...

Silicon Valley 2006.

Robot managed to develop its own autonomous...

Robot also managed to shoot one of its poof balls and hit the center of the top of the projected screen. The ball then fell onto a couple of refs heads... Anyone who's seen how high up that screen is knows that its quiet a feat.

[bigbeezy]

In 2006 during the Galileo quarterfinals our main breaker would cut out right after auton and so we would be dead for most of the match until another robot bumped into us. after our first match of doing this we told our alliance partners to bump us to get us back online, but they too were having electrical problems and weren't able to do anything either. and so we sat in the same position for about a min and a half and then we get bumped and quickly go score but by then its too little too late.

[bigbeezy]

Originally Posted by Zyik

Silicon Valley 2008.

Somehow we managed to break two wheels. I have no idea how, and last time I asked, no one knew. It wasn't like the inside got chewed up, but it looked like it had dented from the outside...

did you get pushed sideways when these broke? I know thats how we broke a couple of our wooden wheels last year.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

2006 - Blew a victor on Einstein. Turned out someone dropped a screw in it. Oops.

2007 - Last qual match on Curie - After auto mode, the gripper automatically opened and dropped a keeper on the rack during teleop. Dropped us from 1 to 3 seed.

[Brandon Holley]

2001: Finished 9th in galileo, didn't get picked

2002: Finals of mid-atlantic regional....our ball dumping basket was up getting ready to drop a load of balls into one of the goals 25 was grasping, and all of a sudden SLAM a cable snapped, we lost by a few points

2004: At PARC our robot decided to write its own auto mode, which deployed our pneumatic pistosn used to lift our robot off the groudn (200+ pounds of force) directly into the pneumatic tanks.....thankfully they only got dented

2005: Quarterfinals of NJ regional match #3, with only 3-4 seconds left I was driving the bot back towards the home zone to hopefully get the bonus 10 points...the arm didn't collapse all the way for some reason so we drove in to the wall hoping it would fold itself back up, and it didn't, i tried to turn aroudn and back in, but time expried

2006: Quarterfinals of Boston, our skyway wheel hub sheared itself off of the rest of the wheel...we hobbled along on 3 wheels trying to keep the other robots off of the ramp, however we were unable to move and 578 got up the ramp with literally no time left

2007: Had one of the best tube scoring averages on archimedes, somehow we got skipped for finals

2008: Our robot arrived a full 8 hours late on thursday, giving us a late start on work that would have taken all day thursday to complete anyway....we weren't fully running until saturday, where we lost in the semis to the dominant 39.


There is always a story to be told.

[s_forbes]

Our team has started a new trend of building robots that don't listen to what we tell them. At three of our last four competitions (07 Atlanta FTC, 08 Arizona FTC, and 08 Arizona FRC) the robot sat still for more than half the time. It's been rather frustrating...

One I remember from 2006: we were in the semis in Sacramento and we were having drivetrain problems. We had just barely squeaked by in our last match, having lost one of our treads. We rivet a new one on and hope for the best; then they both fall off in the next match. Scrambling for time, we repair both of the wheels and put the robot back on the field for our third semi-final match, only to realize we forgot to put the chain back on one side of the drive.

(852 and 1662 were amazing alliance partners, we managed to pull off a win in the finals!)