Silly Programming screw ups (funny)

[slavik262]

This year I wrote code so that when our secondary driver held a switch, the claw on our robot would automatically grab a track ball if one entered the claw (we did this using an IR rangefinder). This code was finished and first tested during a competition match at the West Michigan Regional . Due to an unfortunate glitch, the claw refused to relinquish the first ball it grabbed. When the team asked what was going on, I quipped:

"You said you wanted the claw to automatically grab the ball. You never said anything about letting go of it."

The glitch was gone five minutes later.

[Qbranch]

2006:

The first time we ran our autonomous in competition we did everything right... except for setting the one little bit that turns the PID on to run the flywheel motors on the ball launcher... basically, it looked like the robot threw up in multicolorful poof ball glory.

Another time, our robot was just as happy about shooting 8 balls in rapid succession at an unsuspecting FIRST sponsor wearing a bright green shirt.

2008:

When first beginning to play with the gyro, I didn't notice (for a few hours) that negative was left and positive was right (opposite math).

-q

[Uberbots]

2006:
not so much a programming error, but i was wearing a bright green shirt while programming the robot. I was tuning the camera at the time, and stood next to the goal. the robot went out, and looked like it had found the target, except it kept running towards it. So, i get out of the way and go towards the disable switch and the thing starts to follow me, and proceeds to chase me around our practice field, shooting balls at me while i attempt to get to the button.
funny thing is, it never shot balls as well at the goal as it did at me. ow.

2007:
i used reverse logic for the camera positioning, which led it to spin out of control, while still having control over the arm. one thing led to another, and centripetal acceleration made the robot throw the tube at me. more of a laugh than an ow.

2008:
oh god.
so while programming hybrid it wasn't a priority for the first couple of runs to have the arm in the 'tucked' position- we only wanted it to drive around. So its going at high speed to the turn, and doesnt do it, instead ramming into the fencing on the other side, tearing the gripper to peices. oops.
at the championships i was making corrections for wall distance for the middle ball, and derived it to 285 counts. i typed 385. the robot hit the 3rd ball for no reason i could figure until i saw the code.

[tseres]

this is kind of a funny thing. you see, on our team, everything is the programmers fault, no matter what. it's the way it is. i'm the programmer. we had the robot ready to test, and we powered it on, at which point it flew straight into a heavy table. it was "my fault". turns out another guy was getting ready to go and accidentally buy his backpack on the xbox controller

[ABlackburn]

Originally Posted by tseres

this is kind of a funny thing. you see, on our team, everything is the programmers fault, no matter what. it's the way it is. i'm the programmer. we had the robot ready to test, and we powered it on, at which point it flew straight into a heavy table. it was "my fault". turns out another guy was getting ready to go and accidentally buy his backpack on the xbox controller

on our team everything is the electrical sub-team's fault

[vivek16]

Last year, we had a box on wheels and it was put on the field the wrong way. It ran into the wall...

Yeah, we fix everything in the programming.... Including the welds

-Vivek

[EHaskins]

Originally Posted by ABlackburn

on our team everything is the electrical sub-team's fault

On my team I'm both, so it's alway mechanical.

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by ABlackburn

on our team everything is the electrical sub-team's fault

Originally Posted by EHaskins

On my team I'm both.

Don't blame yourself...

[ttldomination]

Well I have a couple of things. Well, one we had a problem with our code because everytime we tried downloading the code, it gave us the Hex Dump error...we even tried different controllers....just didn' work.

Then, in a couple of matches our IR commands weren't working and so everyone was wondering why, guess why? Turns out it wasn't plugged in...someone had screwed it in..but not wired it up...and guess who had to wire it up...ME...guess who had to rewire the new robot controller ... ME....

but it was fun andi enjoyed it.

[3DWolf]

I had another screw up at Atlanta-
I had gotten our hybrid code to finally work thanks to Q (1024, THANK YOU SO MUCH) and I forgot to switch the bot to low gear to start with - so this thing was going too fast for me to get a good angle on the IR board to throw the stop button and it SLAMS full speed into the opposing player station. I go out to reset the bot (practice match) and a ref says to me "Can you do something about that autonomous? That was a little rough"
Hehe, yeah I changed it promptly.
Who knew a single variable could be so deadly?

[Los Frijoles]

Well our drivetrain/arm PID code is duplicated in many places due to the patchy programming style which results from me and a mentor showing each other programs and adding in programs and taking out others and otherwise just making a big mess out of things...

I was trying to tune the drivetrain PID manually and so I was modifying our #define's for what I thought was the drivetrain PID...turns out it was the arm PID...ack! time to start over again...

On my hobbiest side:
Because I compile MCC18 projects using batch files which open and close quickly, I cannot even count the times I loaded the same program into a microcontroller because I failed to notice that the link operation had failed (MPLINK does not spit out an error file...drat).

Other times, I have forgotten to turn the power on in many projects...

Originally Posted by Chaos in a Can

Leaving the following line in the main while loop for the first match at Wisconsin:

autonomous_mode = p2_sw_aux1;

Now that must have been interesting...

[Blue_Mist]

It's always a programming error on our team. Even when the potentiometer is installed backwards... (11pm, Night-before-Ship, 2007)

[Chaos in a Can]

Originally Posted by Los Frijoles

Now that must have been interesting...

Actually, it just sat there during auto, and since we weren't using that button to control anything, it didn't go into auto during manual either.

[Mike Mahar]

In 2007 we couldn't download to the robot using any of our laptops. We had no problem with our desktops, however. We tried everything. Whenever anyone would start to help us they would always ask if we were using the right version of the IFI loader. (version 1.1.0) We'd look at the IFI loader and, sure enough, it would say that it was v1.1.

We didn't figure it out until the start oft he 2008 season. When we looked at the IFI loader is was displaying the version of the RC's firmware on the main panel which happened to to be v1.1. When we looked at the version using the About menu, we found out that the loader was actually version 1.0.9. The desktops had the new version and worked just fine. We did have the 1.1.0 version on the laptops but the quick start button on the task bar was pointing at the 1.0.9 version which was still loaded on the system.

This problem was missed by at least 8 experianced programmers, including two from IFI.

[artdutra04]

This isn't robot code related, but it is FIRST related.

Last year (during my senior year of high school), while coding Team 228's content management system, I left a few lines of development code in place in one of my email notification scripts. This particular script would email everyone selected, every time a new event was added to the website.

To make sure that all the emails were being queued up and sent correctly, I added my own email address to the BCC headers of each email, and then I had the script send me another email when everything completed just fine. I tested the code running on my local Apache server with a few email addresses, and everything worked just fine. And then I forgot about those few lines of code.

Fast forward some time later, when I forgot to remove those lines of code when turning the development code into production code for deployment on 228's website.

I then proceeded to have my mailbox flooded with 58 emails every time a new event was added to their website. At the time, since I was busy with classes it took a week before I had the time to go and fix that issue.