What are some of your rookie/silly mistakes?

[G.Arizpe]

Originally Posted by Tmaxxrox97

This year I somehow managed to forget the disks for autonomous. Needless to say I am still being and will continue to be hassled about it, but I will never do it again.

Don't worry you're not the only one, our human player last year forgot to place basketballs. During auto we were all waiting for the balls to shoot only to realize there weren't any, we have not let him off that one yet.

[orangemoore]

This year at competition someone who didn't know a thing about the electronics board decided to plug the radio back in on the robot right before a match. Somehow they got it wrong. Luckily the FTA caught it and had us plug it back in. We don't know who did it but next time they will know how to do it.


***Make sure everyone knows to point out something if they don't think it is right but don't try to fix it themselves. ***

[rhinobot]

Originally Posted by ehfeinberg

Well besides forgetting to plug in our radio before a match, or putting the robot on the field without a battery, or losing our robot at competition, or realizing that we left our driver station at home 6+ hours away, or weighing our robot in kilos instead of pounds and finding out that we are 25 lbs overweight a day before ship, my team hasn't made too many 'rookie' mistakes.

Personally, I broke a tap. That is pretty embarrassing.

My nickname is tap. Ive broken 5 on one job, dont feel bad hahaha.

[Graciebot]

We decided it would be a great idea to bolt our bumpers down and it took 10-15 minutes and four people to change them. Not fun when we had nearly back-to-back matches! Thank goodness we went with a much easier design this year...
Also, our first year we didn't understand the importance of driver buttons and took them home the first day of competition. Then we forgot them the next day. That was a catastrophe. Luckily one of the moms ran to get them once we realized where they were. Phew!

[zzzag]

My first year, we got a brand-new Cisco wireless adapter to replace the one we had been using for the previous few years. As the only person in the shop that day who knew how to wire, I got to chop the wall connection off and wire it to a WAGO connector - but both wires were black! A little bit of magic smoke later, I realized I had guessed wrong - and we had to use the old wireless adapter.

We've accidentally sent nearly dead batteries out onto the field on several occasions.

And our Logomotion bot was an exercise in how not to design a robot: we spent most of our six weeks working on a minibot and an arm, only to realize we couldn't extend the arm far enough to pick up tubes from the ground and had no space on the robot to attach a minibot deployment mechanism.

But we've finally learned: as of today, we know that there is a tool for attaching the FlexHub snap rings for the modulox boxes that works better than the needle-nose pliers and screwdrivers we struggled with

[Garrett.d.w]

Every year at bunnybot for us. We have all of the non senior members design and build a bot with minimal help from the senior people.

My freshmen year, I, along with a group of five other students, designed this robot with a giant snow shovel on the end of a big piston. As we were driving, I bumped the controller the wrong way (our programmer plays inverted) and tilted the show shovel down into the carpet and fired the piston at the same time. We halfway did a pole jump before getting stuck. We then proceeded to trash the tread on the wheels and burn a hole in the carpet while trying to escape. I don't think the flaming chickens were too happy with that.

And for logomotion: Using a banebots 256 to 1 transmission to move a 13 foot arm without a counterbalance. It got to the point where we were rebuilding the transmission between every match and taking apart other transmissions for the gears. Ugh. Lets just say that I can now completely reassemble and re grease a transmission in the dark in under five minutes.

[orangemoore]

I remember from last year a team (not mine) left a bunch of tools on their robot and they fell off during the match. I believe that they didn't get a penalty because they were not robot parts.

[sg999]

Last year, we almost forgot to load the game pieces for autonomous for one match. Note that at that point, all (or almost all, I don't remember) of our points were scored through autonomous, as we had no functioning floor pickup, bridge operator, or driver training (so we couldn't even balance).

[nicholsjj]

I remember my second ever match on the drive team. We got the dreaded "Turn Your Robot On" index card. So as I went and re-positioned our robot. As I'm turning back to go off the field, a referee gently taped me on the shoulder and reminded me to still turn the robot on.

[EricLeifermann]

So this is Tyler Olds favorite story to tell about me, though I wan't the only one doing it at the time...

Back when I was a freshman on 93 I was recruited to be the teams welder. I had several years experience welding but had never done TIG welding. So one night a group of us were trying to get some practice in on some new metal the shop teacher had just purchased. Nothing we did would make an arc. I mean we tried everything, change welding machines, change the gas, clean the metal, you name it we tried it. Well, after about 2 hours I had to leave, as I'm packing up my school stuff the mentor who was helping us calls me back into the shop and proceeds to show the group what he had just found... The metal had a thin clear plastic wrap on it to protect it. That is why we couldn't get an arc... Needless to say I still get needled about it today 12 years later.

So always check your metal for a protective covering before trying to weld!

[Sam390250]

This might not exactly be a rookie mistake but at Championships this year on one of the fields I remember a match right after a long break was halted. Turns out one of the little vacuuming robots got stuck under the bridge without anyone noticing and was being destroyed by robots attempting to balance. It was really funny when they pulled it out.

One of my rookie mistakes my freshmen year was during an inspection. The inspector was questioning one of our gear-tooth sensors and told us we needed to remove it. So as a nervous freshman I immediately cut all the wires to get it off of the robot. Turned out it was completely legal after all and I spent a good half hour putting it back in. I learned to think before acting after that incident. I also learned to cut electrical components in a way that might make them salvageable in the future.

[DarrinMunter]

At the Championships, right after the B.E.P. concert we lost a rookie freshmen.
He went to use the restroom, and when we came back in the arena, it was clearing out. Our team had already left, and when we did a head count, found he was missing. It took about 45 minutes for us to find him, on the back far side of the staduim outside. At our end of season banquet, he did win for best rookie team member, and for a prize and we gave him a compass and a whistle.

[PayneTrain]

What is wrong with Team 422's robot in this video?

If you answered "Some idiot freshman in the pit forgot to reconnect the radio before the match, causing the team to lose a match they should have won, boosting them from 4th alliance captain to 2nd alliance captain, allowing them to meet 2753 in the finals and get destroyed instead of the semifinals," then I would respond with "No, I don't know what you are talking about. No, no, no, it wasn't me, I swear! I just personally check the radio before every match now and will continue to do so for no reason at all."

[philso]

My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piq4VSKoy54

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by philso

My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piq4VSKoy54

Did that just hit your roller claw? That's really kinda funny...unfortunate, but funny.