What are your highlights of the build season so far?

[BHS_STopping]

Incidentally, our team highlight probably had to be the accident in the chem lab, right before we left for our workplace.

Basically, one of our electronics guys accidentally broke one of the faucets in the chemistry lab. And when I say break, I mean he snapped the thing clean off of the pipe. Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the thing gushed about four feet into the air without stopping. Then our teacher ran in, panicing. Well, at least we had a plumber on hand before we had the chance to turn the school into an aquarium...

[Ian Curtis]

When our head mentor and a student mananaged to only lay 11" of weld in a 3 hour meeting, the mentor said, "If I was me, I'd fire us."

A low point of the season emerged when last weekend, for lunch we orded 2 2-liter bottles of Sprite, and no where, in the entire school, could we find cups. Luckily we managed to secure some bottles from the vending machine, which was empty this weekend, forcing us to build without a handy bottle of tasty iced tea. The terror!

w00t: Post number trivia of the day. Which team has posted a video in which 10 balls are scored in 1 second?

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by BHS_STopping

Incidentally, our team highlight probably had to be the accident in the chem lab, right before we left for our workplace.

Basically, one of our electronics guys accidentally broke one of the faucets in the chemistry lab. And when I say break, I mean he snapped the thing clean off of the pipe. Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the thing gushed about four feet into the air without stopping. Then our teacher ran in, panicing. Well, at least we had a plumber on hand before we had the chance to turn the school into an aquarium...

That was by far the most entertaining thing I've seen all year! He'll never hear the end of it. My car crash en route to our new building facility was rather amusing, too.

And we thought we'd just be building robots...

[BHS_STopping]

The look on Heller's face was priceless, after all.

But honestly, who designs an intersection like that?

[Modulardragon]

ours would have to be when i suggusted adapting the electronic paintball style hopper for the poof ball holder, and the busy, talkative room got... silent.
It ended up pretty funny, because after we trimmed it some, it worked well
hooray for randomness

[Adam Richards]

Today at the robotics:

Me: "Hey guys, lets go see if we can run the robot up the ramp."
Everyone else: "Okay."

10 minutes later:

*crash from robot tipping completely over*
Team Captain: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Lesson learned: Make sure that your robot is properly balanced.

[KrtZer0]

definitly two days ago when we finially circumvented the regulation not allowing us to use power tools

now we're only 2 1/2 weeks behind

and there was the time we built a prototype launcher out of an old bicylce in one of our basements the day after kickoff.

[AndyB]

my personal high so far this build season has to be the fact that im usually a webmaster, but this year, im doing the inventor award as well. Its kind of cool to have all of the head mechanical people and our engineers coming to me for things. for us, the web team is kind of an independant project, so i really never met many of the mentors. but it feels so cool to know everything that is going on, and for once, contributing some ideas. yes, i have stooped to the level of mechanical

[Alan Anderson]

One of the early highlights for me was watching a couple of the students repeatedly hitting the target with impressive precision using a prototype ball shooter a few days after kickoff.

The "target" was another student.

[Nuttyman54]

first, some background: part of the parking lot at our school is used for motorcycle certification classes on the weekends. our team uses the lot for practice.

The highlight: getting the entire motorcycle class to stop and watch our prototype launcher fire a barrage of poofballs...

[Kim Masi]

I think our team's highlight so far this year is how much our team has grown

last year we had about 15-20 students tops. This year we have grown to 45+!!
It's also incredible how everyone is working really hard and putting forth their opinion and best effort.

Also, the amount of our engineers/mentors has grown too. We have gained a spanish teacher, a tech ed teacher from the middle school, and about 5 new UTC Power engineers!

Its really awesome seeing how much we've grown

[Billfred]

The early highlight thus far has been that we have a corner goal built, and a platform and center goal in the works. And we have carpet, courtesy of USC and a state government person officially declaring it junk, that we'll be able to test on. (Never before has 1293 built as much of the field.)

[sciencenerd]

My best memory on the team so far this year would have to be while we were building our prototype shooter. One of our mentors dropped a dab of hot glue on the table accidentally, and a senior on the team happened to notice it. The mentor said "careful, it's hot", to which the student boldly replied "no it's not!" and reached out to wipe the glue off the table. He touched it, got burned, and exclaimed "Ow!". The whole team kind of burst into spontaneous laughter, as this isn't typical of this particular student, he is usually very responsible and listens to directions.

[LightWaves1636]

get the camera that I swear has a personality to finally cooperate and follow the green screen. don't ask

[Mr. Freeman]

We found the bug in our drive train code. We are using tank treads and some code was written to make them both drive while using only one joystick.
Turns out it was a ">" instead of "<" type-error.

P.S. I know what you mean about the camera. It seems to lock on the target (as indicated by the LEDs) and then track to the lights, then lock and go to [random object here].