A Series of Unfortunate Events

[keehun]

I'm sorry if I mentioned 3009. I really meant to say 3007.

[Akash Rastogi]

Freshman year in 07 we went to the NYC regional. Things were going really well for us when we were selected as the overall 2nd pick. When the 2nd round came by, the next selection was another ring scorer.

We did awesome in the QF's. Won our first SF match with a decently large margin. Then the second match almost right in the beginning, our human player threw a tube onto our flag. We couldn't remove it and we couldn't keep scoring for it would incur a rather large multitube holding penalty. We play defense and wait to just climb the ramps of 522, our alliance captain. We climb the ramps, we are cheering like mad because we think we are in the finals. We then see a referee huddle, and are not happy. The refs make a call that the RAMP we were on, was somehow supported at the bottom by a tube. We took a snapshot of this claim and hushed up not arguing with them (we don't argue calls). We figure if we really deserve to win, we'll win the next match. In the first seconds of teleop in SF match 3, our human player once again, scores a ring on our flag. Needless to say, being the main tube scorer on our alliance, we lost that match. The opposing alliance- a team we started and mentored lol 1302.

We showed the picture and match video to the NJ refs the next day, their call: we would have gotten the bonus points if they had been making the call. Being the honorable team they are, 1302 came over to our pit after winning the regional and gave our human player one of their medals, it was his senior year. Its one of the reasons I love mentoring teams, you get to see what nontechnical things they learned from you.

C'est la vie.

Match vids on TBA Semifinals NYC- http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/team/11/2007

[jamie_1930]

Originally Posted by kapolavery

What were some "unfortunate events" that happened to your robot or your alliance's robot that costed you big time during a match?

2009(with team 2228):

-We used a fisher price motor for our ground pick up mechanism (basically a conveyer belt with poly cord and wedge top) and we had a couple jams and some breaker trips.

-Once at the Hartford Regional in Coneticutt we accidentally plugged the joysticks into the wrong usb ports so i (co-pilot/shooter mechanism) was driving and our driver was turning our turret. It took us almost the entire match to figure out what was wrong, mainly do to the fact that our traction control wasn't working and the wheels wouldn't turn till i pressed the trigger.

-Also at Hartford we had a communication error with the field (our "guess" seeing it worked fine tethered and our wifi block was on out at the field) and the field hands wouldn't let us back on the field, despite the huge window of time before alliance pickings. As a result we had a greatly deminished chance of being picked, and weren't, because we couldn't prove to the other teams there wasn't a problem with our robot.

2008(with team 1930):

-Last year at Finger Lakes we forgot to plug in power to the left CIM motors so we just spun in place and had a group slap because of this incident.

-Also we ended up having another robot puncture our side plating (32nd inch aluminum just so we had a place to put our sponsors)

-And finally we had a hard hit with another robot and our claw mechanism that knocked of one half of our claw because we forgot to put the final welds on it and it was only tack welded.

[thefro526]

This year we only had one on field failure during a non-practice match. In Match 58 on Curie we were playing the Thunder Chickens. We knew that we'd need to play hard defense to win the match. 60 seconds into the match we held their alliances to 20 points when we hit them head on to help our partner pin them. Apparently we went hit them we jarred our master ground connection loose and the robot died completely.... We still tied the match 58-58.

[pacoliketaco]

well, our robot was fine this season, but i cut my finger open on a moving chain/sprocket. that was a fun way to spend Thursday at nationals. So i went to Atlanta, all ready to play frisbee the whole time, and the first day i injure my throwing finger, and didn't get to play at all. Now, two weeks later, i still don't have full feeling in that finger...

[Josh Drake]

Only I would get stung by a wasp while trying to dismantle our pit after the Palmetto regional. I guess that's why they want you to wear gloves; the rogue wasp in Littlejohn Coliseum!

[byteit101]

In seeding matches, 3 things killed us:
we had a harvester of pvc pipes on our front with just a thin cardboard like sponsor board, and during auto, playing in the center pos, we rammed into another robot so that their edge hit our harvester, and our harvester fell apart and prevented us from moving (we took a video of our matches from our camera, and you can see it collide with us very hard!) the programmers changed it to turn and then go forward slowly in auto after that
We put in a dead battery (6V?) and crawled
we were downloading the movies from the robot, and we had to go up, so we took the laptop to the staging area, finished, but forgot to plug in our WGA, and our light was BLINK.BLINK.BLINK.BLINK the match as we got scored apon

[LWakefield]

In a semi finals match, in the third match, we had a bad battery and our robot didn't go anywhere.

[drumfreak]

During the qualifying rounds at the Arizona Regionals, our robot actually caught on fire! We couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, so we rewired it to see if that would make it stop smoking. Our alliance won that match, but it counted as a loss for our team because we didn't move at all. We found out later that it was our jaguar that caught fire and we didn't have to rewire the robot. Even though we lost that match horribly, we still got chosen by the number 1 seed to move on to the finals. We did awesome in those and ended up winning!

[NC GEARS]

WATCHDOG! We kept getting it in the worst matches and we checked and rechecked the code and there wasnt anything wrong with it from what we could tell.

[fuzzy1718]

We missed all our practice matches and 2 of our qualifications at kettering due the code not permaenatly loading to the robot. Because we were hit so much our gyro got outta whack all the time and the turret was at least 1/4 turn off. during our 1st elim at kettering our DS fried and two PWM's got switched so the turret couldn't move... need I go on this was a rough year for the robot, very few mwchanical problems though

[Schnabel]

In qualification match 57 (about 1:45 into the video, you can see our fan stop spinning), I knocked our competition port loose right as we were getting ready to score. The connector had tape on it to indicate that it was for station number 3 (why I will never know). Anyways the tape prevented us from screwing in the connector, so a little jiggle here, and my hand coming down on the cord knocked it loose. We had to wait what seamed like forever for the DS to restart, then right as it started we took off. I think we scored some, but mostly didn't at the end.