What's the Stupidest/Funniest Thing you did in Robotics during the '06 Season?

[Queen_of_Mascot]

I feel so strange making threads...

If I'm making too many, please prod me.

>>

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Another curiosity... with over a thousand teams out there, nearing two thousand, there have to be plenty of stories of the stupidest thing you did in robotics, even if just in this season...

Yeah. I'll post mine once I see a few others...

And remember, an added benefit, next time you or someone else really messes up, you can just say "Hey, it could've been worse, I could've done 123 like person person ABC from team XYZ did in '06!"

[thegathering]

posted for a friend of mine:

Kicked a ball (the ones used in the launcher) and hit a lady in the head while she was talking to our team leader. He apparently didn't know who she was. A little later, he kicked the same ball and hit her in the head a second time, both times by accident.

He had NO idea that the lady was the principal of our school that he managed to hit in the head with a ball 2x.

[Bill_Hancoc]

This wasnt really robotics but while i was at the hotel in nats a few girls from my team locked me a few others on the balcony of our hotel room and i climbed over the barrior between the balconys to the next girls room over and went over to open the door

[Tytus Gerrish]

Lets see. I shot out a window with an 1-1/4" pnumatic gun loaded with a steel bolt the night our principal visited the shop. Oh and i have a visiual aide

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/15214


i seem to remember a few more things that i shopuild probaly still not mention to the general public for a few more years.

Let's Just say i am the one that gives Firefighters, paramedics, and law enforcement a job

[Queen_of_Mascot]

Wow... and I thought what I did was bad...

Earlier in the year we had this room we were painting our shipping crate, and made a bit of a mess. I remembered one teacher saying how shaving cream will take paint off of cars, and also works nicely for getting ink off of desks.

So anyway, we have this huge box of shaving gel. Key word--gel, not cream, which I didn't really think of until later.

Now, we don't just have a few cans, we have about a hundred or so sample-size cans, so we... used them all, and covered the room (which was about twenty feet by ten feet-ish) with a few inch layer of... shaving gel, which kinda expands as it sits for a bit.

Now, we then realized we had a problem--not only was the gel not taking off the paint, but we were three inches deep in shaving foam, with piles going up to a foot high in some corners. Now, initially it was nice fun foam--we had foam wrestling, covered kids in foam, foam fights, etc. It was a /lot/ of fun, but after a day or two, it dries and becomes a crusty, flaky, powdery mess.

So what did we do?

We flooded the room with water. And not just buckets or something--we took PVC piping, and rigged the sink in the corner to let out at three points via an irrigation system, and flooded the room. Now, we thought it'd dissolve the shaving gel and it'd wash into the drainage in the floor that we assumed was /somewhere/ in the room (note--this wasn't our main shop room, but a room off the side of that which was a service room of sorts), but two problems emerged.

First of all, it didn't do much to the foam except partially dissolve it and make a disgusting, slushy mess. Second, /there was no drain/.

So you see where the issue is?

Then we take the shop vac and rig it with PVC to suck up a lot of the water, which works until the shop vac gets full. Rather then be smart and just put it in reverse and pump the water into the drain in the sink, we decide to get our mentor (you'll see why getting the mentor is a bad idea in this case, in a second). He decides that we already messed up enough, won't let us reverse the shop vac, forces us to carry it to the sink, which makes a huge mess, and then disallows us from using it.

He then decides to use the spare cardboard from some class project to soak it up, like a sponge. But... it doesn't work as planned, so now we have a slushy, slurry mess of dissolved cardboard, shaving foam, and water. We pick up the cardboard, put down more, repeat... until the room is dry enough that we can just let it air dry.

Yeah. X_X

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This wasnt really robotics but while i was at the hotel in nats a few girls from my team locked me a few others on the balcony of our hotel room and i climbed over the barrior between the balconys to the next girls room over and went over to open the door

Ha, for a moment I wondered if you were from our team... me and my friend did the SAME thing (except it was at the '05 nats) to some friends of ours, locked them out, and they climbed across the balcony...

What hotel were you at when you did that? -wonders if it was the same hotel, therefore allowing the same strategy-

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Woah. Why were you shooting the bolt in the first place? That sounds /really/ dangerous and... fun.

[neo]

At nationals we were at the Embassy Suites next to the airport. We were literally the only team in the place (still dont know why). Anyway, a couple of guys got a hold of a frisbee (i think it was one of 399's from vegas. we were attached to that thing in the shop) and started throwing it across the indoor recreation type of thing while on the 5th floor. The frisbee ended up going down a few floors and hitting a door or a wall. A few times someone would open a door to see what the matter was. We would eventually take the elevator down and retrieve the frisbee.

Also, something that happened just last week (i guess it doesnt count for the 06 season). A teammate was giving me a friendly push, ended up pushing too hard and had me land straight on the bin of the 06 bot. In this pic, the right side of the front corner of the ball bin. Not fun having a 4 inch scar (i wouldnt call it a gash, but it certainly felt like one) from a robot.

[RoboMadi]

uhhh....... In robotics?

Well, stupidest mistake a programmer can make : miss a semi colon ';'

And i bet all the programmers out there has done it

[Bill_Hancoc]

Originally Posted by Queen_of_Mascot

Ha, for a moment I wondered if you were from our team... me and my friend did the SAME thing (except it was at the '05 nats) to some friends of ours, locked them out, and they climbed across the balcony...

What hotel were you at when you did that? -wonders if it was the same hotel, therefore allowing the same strategy-

We were in that one attached to the mall that had like 4 underground floors and a nightclub on the top floor and the pool....i dont remember the name tho

the one where the cops came cause there was apparently people throwing things off the balcony into the center of the hotel...since that is illegal i guess...fun stuff tho....and a great view

[Andrew Blair]

Well, for prototyping and testing purposes, we had allowed our pwm cables from live speed controllers just hang unplugged while we tested. Well, I went to turn on the bot, and a massive cloud of smoke rolled out from our eelctronics. I had completely burned the ground insulation off when a cable shorted the power screws to a victor. Luckily, the brain was unharmed.

A year or two ago, close to our entire team piled into an elevator and made an unexpected stop at the basement...

I guess we're pretty mild.

[anna~marie]

I fried out camera... It was the first year we had them, the first week. I was given the task to figure it out... yeah

[X-Istence]

Originally Posted by RoboMadi

uhhh....... In robotics?

Well, stupidest mistake a programmer can make : miss a semi colon ';'

And i bet all the programmers out there has done it

Anyone that says they have not is lying!

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

Well, for prototyping and testing purposes, we had allowed our pwm cables from live speed controllers just hang unplugged while we tested. Well, I went to turn on the bot, and a massive cloud of smoke rolled out from our eelctronics. I had completely burned the ground insulation off when a cable shorted the power screws to a victor. Luckily, the brain was unharmed.

Same thing happened to my mentor.


Stupidest mistake I made? When I was supposed to disconnect the battery from a running motor I automatically just let it fall and stepped back. In this case though, the two wires fell into the connector completing the circuit and the rest is history . (Caused our welds to break!)

[Donut]

This year the stupidest thing was spending 20 minutes trying to test with the camera and looking at all the values on the dashboard to figure out why it wasn't working, only to realise we never removed the lens cap.

I don't think there were any really hysterical moments this year, though the shooter testing was quite fun (it ended up turning into a game of semi-baseball with a pvc bat).

[Jaine Perotti]

I did a lot of "stupid" things in robotics, but the one that stands out most in my mind was blowing up one of the victors (not last year, but the year before), by touching the battery leads to the motor output terminals instead of the battery ones. It smelled very bad.

Trying to lighten the robot in the pit with the corded drill, accidentally going in too far after pushing out the other side of the aluminum, and snapping the 9/32 drill bit when the end of it wedged itself in some #35 chain.

Having to drill 11 different holes before I got the correct placement when building the mount for the bottom pulley in our 2004 robot.

When I was a freshman, having to teach myself "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" because I overthought it. I felt so awkward even using basic hand tools cause I knew I would turn them the wrong way... lol...

...oops, this is supposed to be for 2006. So...

All of the countless times I have had to remake parts because there was some small thing wrong with them. That happens every year.

Also, don't date anyone on your team unless you are POSITVE that you will be able to handle yourself professionally, not only during your relationship, but even after it ends. Yuck. That was a stupid mistake I made this past season.

This year I also got a blood blister when I pinched my middle finger in the arbor press. Don't ask how it happened... I know it must sound like I got angry at it and it got angry back at me, but it was more like negligence on my part.

Also, while this wasn't my fault, I got smacked in the head with a poof ball by Sean Lynch from 1782... it was an interesting first impression upon meeting him.

[Billfred]

Stupidest thing I did this season?

a) Say that I'd get a haircut if 1293 won all three of its matches on Saturday at Palmetto. (In each of those three matches, we faced either the Mech Techs, the Pi-oneers, or Metal-In-Motion with, more or less, a box on wheels. It didn't seem like things would go that way, but good strategy, good defense, and a few lucky breaks on alliance partners did the job.)

b) Relaying to Jessica Boucher the news I heard that she was working on Archimedes, not Galileo.

[Dan Petrovic]

Something along the lines of Halo 2 in an Omni Hotel room with a projector and a balcony.

Oh dear... I've said too much.