It is impossible... ...until there is no other way...

[thefro526]

I have two, both of which are fresh in my mind from last weekend.

Sometime Friday afternoon my Driver Begins to complain about the left side of the drive, he says it feels "Funny". We get the robot off the field and look at the drive, and nothing appeared to be wrong, I turned it by hand and there was no binding, no noise, and it just felt okay. So, I told him we'll worry about it if it becomes serious. Three or Four Matches go by and we notice our Autonomous Mode is drifting hard towards the side in question, and it almost looks like there's some sort of mechanical problem with the drive, and each time I spin it and it feels okay, so I'm stumped and just tell him to Drive through it, which he did very well. Fast forward to Lunch Break before Eliminations, when one of the other mentors tells us that one of the PWMs to the left side of the drive was unplugged... We plugged it in and it worked perfect.

Match 64 was to be our final Qualifying match, and it was with 103, and I've been dying to play alongside 103 for years. So the match starts, our Autonomous goes and the robot stops like usual, and then a little bit of smoke starts coming from the robot. A little bit of smoke turns into a lot of smoke, at which point the match is called. I ran onto the field without hesitation and turned the robot off and open the cover as more smoke came out. We began frantically looking for the problem (still on the field) and I see that two of our PWM Cables have shorted together which caused them to burn the insulation off of the wires. Luckily, due to the setup of Philly, our head pit guy (aka Pitmaster) was standing within yelling distance of the field, and I got him to run back to the pits and grab a handful of PWMs. I rewired the bot, in the most quick and nasty fashion I could, and we went on to play the match. We won the match 5 to 3. Most people saw the smoke and figured that our robot was toast, but some quick thinking saved it, and a win.