Silly Programming screw ups (funny)

[mcf747]

2008:

I am hooking up the electrical and working with our programmer to well drive the motors im hooking up.(the two window motors keyed together). Any way we have a button set to automatically shoot the ball out of the arm and then drop the arm to a position where it can pick up a ball again. At our first regional we end up inverting the position of our window motors and go out to another practice match. We start the automatic sequence and bang the arm drives backwards and fold over itself crashing into the back of the robot. We cant figure out what happened but I think it was the recoil from the punch so i tell our drivers to not raise the arm so high when they fire it and in the next match it does the same thing. We put a hard stop, using steel wire, on it as the arm was "pushing" through the stop sensor think this would stop the recoil. We send it back out and it happens again and then i remember that we never reversed the code when we inverted the motors, and the powerful worm drives pushed through our hard stop and the delay was to great from the senors that the arm was already more than half way over when the arm lost its momentum, crashing down anyway due to gravity.

What we learned:
-Two worm drives are no match for a 20G steel cable
-Remember to check code after inverting ANYTHING
-Built a robot so tough it can handle major abuse to cover for the occasional mistake

Matthew
MorTourq 1515

[Jay Lundy]

In 2001 I was trying to write a program to automatically balance the bridge (which was basically a big see-saw) with our 2000 robot and a gyro. My first idea was to have it slowly drive up the bridge until it sensed rotation, then have it reverse proportional to the gyro input. Unfortunately I got the gyro input backwards, and as the bridge started to tip instead of reversing the robot began to accelerate. The faster it tipped, the more it accelerated. Fortunately the bridge and the robot came crashing down on the other side before the robot could launch itself off the end or else it would have really caught some air.

[Qbranch]

Originally Posted by mcf747

What we learned:
-Two worm drives are no match for a 20G steel cable
-Remember to check code after inverting ANYTHING
-Built a robot so tough it can handle major abuse to cover for the occasional mistake

*chuckle* I guess you didn't need MorTorque.

Back when we were using a toughbox transmission at the Midwest regional, the 36:1 -> 12.75:1 reduction from the dual FP motors was SO SLOW... but way way too forceful (it could lift the whole robot without breaking a sweat).

Well... and we found out on our practice bot that if it did break a sweat... it bent a 9" length of beautiful new 1/2" stainless steel shaft.

...After that we made a new single-reduction-stage transmission that saved weight and turned all that extra force into lightning quick arm speed.

-q

p.s. It never screwed up the right way in competition, but we found out that if you pick the ball up then hold the manual up button with only a few psi of air in the system... the ball flys out and actually goes high enough to hurdle over the back of the robot with a perfect shot.

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

You see FIRST really does prepare you for a professional career in programming. I've been a systems programmer for 20 years and every time something goes wrong its my fault. Then I spend a week proving its not...And even though its a hardware problem I am expected to write code to fix it. Thats because software is free, you can't touch it or see it. When I come into work no says 'good morning', they say 'you have a software problem.'

But the load of money they give me makes up for it.

Just imagine what its like to be a programmer on my teams.

BC
Programming Mentor
Team 1675, 1714

You know those lines in the code that say
/* Do not remove */

They really do mean it.

that became evident when we accidentally deleted a line in the autonomous code and the robot sat through a whole match.

BC
Programming Mentor
Team 1675 , 1714

[BigJ]

2007:

Team:"Can you make the robot drive forward for two seconds after unfolding the arm?"
Programmer:"Sure, that's easy!"

Match starts... and the robot careens into the opposite wall!

Programmer:"Well, you didn't remind me to stop it!"

We were on the ref's watch list for the rest of the event as we later found out.


Because of this incident, every time we change the autonomous, everyone asks if it stops when it's done.

[lasereyes]

Originally Posted by BigJ

2007:

Team:"Can you make the robot drive forward for two seconds after unfolding the arm?"
Programmer:"Sure, that's easy!"

Match starts... and the robot careens into the opposite wall!

Programmer:"Well, you didn't remind me to stop it!"

We were on the ref's watch list for the rest of the event as we later found out.


Because of this incident, every time we change the autonomous, everyone asks if it stops when it's done.

Same thing happened to me this year during build season. Except when I did it, the laptop was still plugged in, and I had to run after it until it went through 2 stools, a table, and finally hit the wall. Luckily the arm wasn't deployed.

[JesseK]

This one reminds me of Zoolander:

On our scrimmage bot from the summer we broke a banebots 56mm drive transmission due to over-agressive driving and direction changes. Since we didn't want this happening to our expensive new AM shifters, the coding team implemented a "soft steer" drive that limited how fast the robot could change directions for the '08 season. They had limited testing due to unforseen and unavoidable build-team delays.

We get to VCU in week 2 and all of a sudden the robot can't turn left in teleoperated mode! This was the cause of most of our penalties at VCU. All our driver could say was "I don't know, don't blame me, I'm not an ambiturner!". We commented out that portion fo the code Friday night and BAM it could turn left.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

This line of code was inserted into a file which contains prominent warnings that it is not to be modified. Some of us programmers know the reason for the warnings, and know that some modifications are "safe". We just fail to clean up after ourselves sometimes.

In my line of work, we affectionately refer to this approach as "Seagull Engineering". Why? Because we swoop in, flap around making a lot of noise and commotion, leave a big mess of "stuff" behind and then fly off. (You can substitute your own words in for "stuff" ) No one really knows what we did or what happened.

[11Mort11]

mecanum drive code in a tank drive robot
bad things happened

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by JesseK

This one reminds me of Zoolander:

On our scrimmage bot from the summer we broke a banebots 56mm drive transmission due to over-agressive driving and direction changes. Since we didn't want this happening to our expensive new AM shifters, the coding team implemented a "soft steer" drive that limited how fast the robot could change directions for the '08 season. They had limited testing due to unforseen and unavoidable build-team delays.

We get to VCU in week 2 and all of a sudden the robot can't turn left in teleoperated mode! This was the cause of most of our penalties at VCU. All our driver could say was "I don't know, don't blame me, I'm not an ambiturner!". We commented out that portion fo the code Friday night and BAM it could turn left.

For future reference, you can run the AM shifters HARD without issue.

[pogenwurst]

Originally Posted by Cow Bell Solo

Saying it's Programmings Fault is a viable reason for everything, EXCEPT THE ROBOT FALLING APART

Hmm, I've got a lot of funny stories on that, but my favorite has to be the elimination match when instead of the usual routine of driving forward to get line-crossing points, our robot promptly spent its hybrid mode driving in circles. Of course, I got "the look" from several members of my team, until I looked under our robot afterwards and pointed out the wheel resting diagonally between two pillow blocks.

One instance where it was my fault: half the team was struggling along with me to discover why no Victor we threw at our proto board would drive a motor. What I eventually realized (and of course, failed to tell them), was that I still had the joystick values overridden to neutral whenever a rangefinder read less than 6 inches.

The rangefinder was unplugged, thus "reading" 0 inches.

[ExarKun666]

Another funny one I got is when in autonomous, this year, we were in a practice match in the regionals at L.A. and it was the first time we were going to test autonomous, my autonomous was just said to drive straight, but what I forgot was that one wheel rotated faster then the other, and in my autonomous code I had the robot going full speed. So autonomous starts, and the left motor goes super fast, and the right goes semi fast, and it veers and hits the center divider really hard. Teleop mode starts, and our driver can't start the robot, we go down to check it out after the match, and the battery cable had come unconnected, as well, as other cables, all because of my autonomous, boy did I get yelled at after that.

[Eric24]

Today at the Vex Championship we added two extra motors to the arm, so I was programming autonomous quickly and forgot to add the stop to those motors. It ended up that the arm flipped over backwards and we actually scored because the arm dumped all the balls into the bridge backwards. Everyone was so stunned since that was never the intention of the program. It was the most amazing autonomous ever!

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Eric24

Today at the Vex Championship we added two extra motors to the arm, so I was programming autonomous quickly and forgot to add the stop to those motors. It ended up that the arm flipped over backwards and we actually scored because the arm dumped all the balls into the bridge backwards. Everyone was so stunned since that was never the intention of the program. It was the most amazing autonomous ever!

Are you keeping that "bug"?