Crazy Robot Inspection Stories

[BrendanB]

Speed racer weighed 65lbs in the end and worked perfectly. Our team decided not to focus on hanging if it meant we would have mediocre ball kicking and handling. So we avoided it and still ended with a rather good robot.

[Zach Purser]

Originally Posted by EricH

You seriously need to add functionality... As long as you can do it in allowed build periods, of course!

Lower weight can be a large part of your functionality if your function is to be very agile. It's all part of strategy. If you can outrun the big guys and do what you want then good for you.

[pakratt1991]

Originally Posted by ErichKeane

This happened at Portland this year. They showed up with the kitbot. The SWAT kids and a bunch of other students spent all of Thursday building this robot, which actually ended up doing pretty well.

I was one of those SWAT members, They showed up weighing under 65 pounds and didn't even ship the robot, they just carried it in to the competition. I was waiting on them to hand them their schedule of practice matches and when they finally arrived I saw that the batter connector wasn't connected to the battery.

I asked them how it was supposed to run and the student there said that it ran great if you connected the motors directly to the leads of the battery...

The mentor had only brought 3 students because he read that was the maximum amount of students allowed to compete.

Thanks to an insane mount of help from Volunteers, local teams. I'd have to look back at the pictures to see which teams exactly were helping, I know 997, and 488, and the team across from them in the pits, this was a high number team, three thousand something, the name and number are still not coming to me. After many hours and more than a few trips to the machine shop they did end up competing and winning the rookie inspiration award.

[ErichKeane]

Originally Posted by pakratt1991

I was one of those SWAT members, They showed up weighing under 65 pounds and didn't even ship the robot, they just carried it in to the competition. I was waiting on them to hand them their schedule of practice matches and when they finally arrived I saw that the batter connector wasn't connected to the battery.

I asked them how it was supposed to run and the student there said that it ran great if you connected the motors directly to the leads of the battery...

The mentor had only brought 3 students because he read that was the maximum amount of students allowed to compete.

Thanks to an insane mount of help from Volunteers, local teams (I'd have to look back at the pictures to see which teams exactly were helping, I know 997, and 488, and the team across from them in the pits... Another high three thousand something team,) and the machine shop they did end up competing and winning the rookie inspiration award.

Correct! I was with the neighbors to the left (3210). I looked over a few times to see if they needed anything, but there were always a dozen+ people there! I was very impressed with how they did, but more so with the amount of people who helped out. Definitely GP at its finest.

[sparrowkc]

In 2007, our rookie year, somebody donated a 400 foot roll of green 14 gauge wire. We used it every place we could, including for four runs through our 5 foot arm. When our inspector said that the wire didn't meet the color coding requirements, we produced the rule he was referring to and pointed out that it only applied to wires on the input terminals of the speed controllers. He then decided that green wire wasn't allowable because green usually stands for ground. As a rookie team, we didn't know to escalate the problem to the lead inspector, and ended up rewiring the whole robot on practice day. Another team donated the ~50 feet of red and black wire. I wish we remembered which team that was so that we could thank them...

This was also the year that we assumed fitting in the sizing box meant fitting in the sizing box, not sitting in the sizing box without touching any of the walls. That was fun.

[GLDomination]

Originally Posted by JimWright949

In Seattle last year, a team brought, what I thought at the time, their rolling tool box to the scale. They then put the tool box on the scale and I discovered that the 180 pound item on the scale, was, actually their robot.

I called a few other veteran mentors over and told the team. 'These people are here to help you loose 60 pounds of robot.'

-Jim

I was there for that. There robot looked like a mini-fridge. We felt so bad when they saw what there weight was.

[Lee Reid 3136]

We passed inspection on the first try of our rookie year.

Not to incredibly crazy but its a story.

[Lil' Lavery]

My story is a little, actually quite, different than most of these. I've probably mentioned it once or twice in a couple different threads, so please bare with me (or just stop reading) if I'm repeating myself.

My senior year with 116, we were well on our way to passing inspection (on our first try, no less). Our inspector was talking to another inspector, who specialized in electronics. They asked us politely if we could take a short break in the inspection...
...so they could photograph our electronics layout.

It was, without a doubt, the single moment that has made me the most proud of any robot I've built in FIRST. More proud than when we won the FIRST Vex Challenge pilot in 2005. More proud than when the robot they pictured went further in Atlanta than we've ever gone before. Even more proud than when a rookie team came up to our bot to admire the engineering.

...and I didn't even work on the electronics.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

My story is a little, actually quite, different than most of these. I've probably mentioned it once or twice in a couple different threads, so please bare with me (or just stop reading) if I'm repeating myself.

My senior year with 116, we were well on our way to passing inspection (on our first try, no less). Our inspector was talking to another inspector, who specialized in electronics. They asked us politely if we could take a short break in the inspection...
...so they could photograph our electronics layout.

It was, without a doubt, the single moment that has made me the most proud of any robot I've built in FIRST. More proud than when we won the FIRST Vex Challenge pilot in 2005. More proud than when the robot they pictured went further in Atlanta than we've ever gone before. Even more proud than when a rookie team came up to our bot to admire the engineering.

...and I didn't even work on the electronics.

I remember that bot. It's why we started using Mini Andersons for everything. That change has made a world of difference in how easy it is to layout a board, integrate mechanisms, and move an electronic component if necessary. Those have also been huge in easing the pain of quickly wiring pneumatic valves, test motors, etc -- there's never a mix-up of putting two female ends together, red to black, etc.

[rocknthehawk]

Not necesarrily having to do with the robot...

my first and only trip to Atlanta (2005), while having our robot inspected, one of the inspectors had a laugh about my hair (i had my mohawk spiked at the time), with the comment "time for a trim!". He pulled out some small scissors, and we kind of laughed. He then cut part of my hair off.

I don't know if he thought it wasn't real or what, but that was a very big deal. It wasn't a few millimeters like a trim would be, it was an inch or more at the back of my head...when you hold the world record by a few inches, every little bit counts. A few people from FIRST came over to our pit later to apologize, and the inspector did the same later that day.

[FRC4ME]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

My story is a little, actually quite, different than most of these. I've probably mentioned it once or twice in a couple different threads, so please bare with me (or just stop reading) if I'm repeating myself.

My senior year with 116, we were well on our way to passing inspection (on our first try, no less). Our inspector was talking to another inspector, who specialized in electronics. They asked us politely if we could take a short break in the inspection...
...so they could photograph our electronics layout.

It was, without a doubt, the single moment that has made me the most proud of any robot I've built in FIRST. More proud than when we won the FIRST Vex Challenge pilot in 2005. More proud than when the robot they pictured went further in Atlanta than we've ever gone before. Even more proud than when a rookie team came up to our bot to admire the engineering.

...and I didn't even work on the electronics.

Would you mind posting a link to that picture (or a similar one)? My team's electronics layout sucked this year - when a relay failed, we simply added a new one because the old one was impossible to access - and I need to show them an example of how to do it right.

[quinxorin]

I once saw a robot wired entirely with green wire (which, stranger still, wasn't one of thier team colors).

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by FRC4ME

Would you mind posting a link to that picture (or a similar one)? My team's electronics layout sucked this year - when a relay failed, we simply added a new one because the old one was impossible to access - and I need to show them an example of how to do it right.

I can't find a great picture of the 2007 iteration, but here is a thread about the 2005 version (note this post about the 2007 version). And here you can see it in the 2007 robot, and here you can see it unfolded (before the wires were fully cleaned up).