How fast have you broken stuff?

[hihihiflcl81pig]

Ok, so our team wanted to build a prototype to test all of the new systems, and to have it for driving practice. Two days after the game was announced we had that bot done. We drove it around, and everything was perfect. The next day we were driving the bot again, and both of the Jaguars on the bot burnt out. Luckily, they will replace them, as long as we sent them the burnt ones back for analysis.

So how about your team? The worst thing that I can imagine is some team burning out their C-Rio. (Anyone?)

[T3H_K3YM45T3R]

my team had a jag short and it killed the signal for about 10 seconds and then it went back to normal

[NorviewsVeteran]

Last year we popped our trackball by the second week

[SWIM]

I hope they're wrong, but according to my electrical team, they bricked a pair of Jaguars teaching rookies how to wire the control system, and not checking to make sure the wires were going to where they should be before turning the crio on.

This happened either immediately after the kickoff, or perhaps even before that.

[mynameisbob]

Weve broken the plastic camera mount, but thankfully that isnt vitally important and its only a minor problem.

[viperred396]

Originally Posted by mynameisbob

Weve broken the plastic camera mount.

Wow we broke ours also

[Sleiter]

Yeah, We had our practice bot up and running the first week, but we blew 2 of the jags. They both still turned on, but wouldn't run the motors! IT'S FRUSTRATING!!! I was expecting trouble, but already?

[Uberbots]

We fried our OI two years ago by having it sink waaay too much current.
We had an uncountable amount of broken fiberglass dowels last year

luckily i dont think we have ever broken an important part of the control system (less the oi)

[The Megan 2207]

We fried a PWM cable in '07. It could have been a lot worse (I believe it was connected to the OI), but fortunately it was just the cable that released blue smoke.

Last year we broke so many 1/4" drill bits that our mentors ordered a 12-pack of 1/4" drill bits to replace them. We broke a couple of those too.

[spc295]

we lost a joystick, not really sure what happened there

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by NorviewsVeteran

Last year we popped our trackball by the second week

It took you 2 weeks?!?

Ours came equipped with a hole (and it finished tearing itself apart within 2 hours of kickoff )

[Cow Bell Solo]

Originally Posted by The Megan 2207

We fried a PWM cable in '07. It could have been a lot worse (I believe it was connected to the OI), but fortunately it was just the cable that released blue smoke.

It was connected to the RC and I was lucky that it was just the cable that released the smoke!!

[daltore]

One of our more head-in-the-clouds members decided the positive-to-negative rule of series connections worked for putting power cables on batteries too, so we ended up with a backward battery plug that no one noticed before plugging it into the wireless router so the OI would be portable. I'm so glad we had the foresight to just plug it into the router instead of the DS. The router blew, so we opened it up and fortunately it was just a 0-ohm resister that we could solder over and fix the problem. That was 4 days after kick-off.

Last year's robot, we had 6 Victors. By the end of the season, we'd bought 6 replacements, but only for 4 of them. We had (6) 4" wheels going 1200 RPM with wedge-top tread. When consulting the table that says how likely you are to blow a motor controller, we realized we were off the chart. We also ran through a set of IFI traction wheels, 3 sets of treads, 4 sprockets, a forklift fork, and have 4 SLA batteries that are on their last chemical reactions from that one build season.

After last year, we've decided to use the ToughBoxes, #35 chain, bulk belting, robones lexan, the new Banebots gearboxes, we're prototyping everything, and putting structural reinforcement on every single part of the robot that has any chance of being exposed to stress so we either won't break anything, or it'll be cheap to fix.

[Urban Hawk]

well... we may not have been the fastest to break stuff but when we do it we do it quite thoughly.
we have pure bad luck

three years ago:
Half way though the Chesapeake Regionals our robot caught on fire.

After the competition, as we were taking the robot home, it caught on fire again in the back of my moms van. Apparently someone forgot to disconnect the battery.
(remember... no smoking in the car)



Two years ago:
We were testing our robot out by having our robot do burn-outs in the School's cafeteria, while being watched by the schools janitors, and we effectively turned the floor from white to black. However during the testing we lost control of our robot it slammed into the wall breaking off some of the the tiles on the wall and bending the axle on one of our wheels. (The janitors were laughing hysterically at that.)

While at competition our control system wasn't working in the first match. They let us do a rematch and again it didn't work. We took it to the pits and disassembled it only to find out that the school was getting a 2 hour early dismissal and that according to their policy all but 2 of our team had to leave (luckily my mom was there so i stayed), had drive through the storm (even though it wasn't snowing at all at the competition) and then they turned around once they got to the school and drove back. To top it off one of the officials told us after they left that there was nothing wrong with our system and that it was their own system that was having problems and wouldn't even let us redo the first match. in essence we disassembled it for nothing and then had almost no one left to reassemble it.

We got it fixed in time for the 7th match. Durring the 7th match the motor on our arm designed to lift the tubes was too powerful and snapped itself in half. (We latter tested the motor and found it had so much torque it could flip itself over while running even though it was a square.)

During the 8th match we pushed the rest of the arm of the robot through the floor of the robot and the 150 pound tested fishing line we were using snapped and wrapped around our tires and ruined the wheel motors which ended any hopes to redeem ourselves.





last year:
in the second round of the competition we got slammed by two robots at the same time which twisted our entire frame and made it impossible for us to drive and effectively eliminated us from the competition.
Also while we were trying to fix the robot we tried to test the wheels. One of my teammates got his hand caught in the wheel and had to go to the hospital.





this year:
during the second day one of my teammates tripped and punched a hole in the wall
i wonder what else will happen this year.....

[royalpl]

We forgot to check wires beore turning on our system, and managed to reverse the positive and negative power on the analog berakout. It was actually kind of cool to see it catch fire for a second.