A Series of Unfortunate Events

FIRST General Forum
#21

I GTR this year we made it to the finals and won our first match against 1114, only to have our robot break down. After calling a timeout our alliance partner 188 was 5 seconds late to the field and couldn’t play in the 2nd match.

Finally, in the 3rd match with about 10 seconds left we we’re leading but they shot a super cell which bounced off a robot and into our trailer with a final score of 97-90 for them.

I’d Call THAT unfortunate. But it was still lots of fun and full of gracious professionalism.

There were a couple other parts to this story that I left out and can be found http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76143&highlight=GTR

#22

Lol. Chris, you need a hug? :stuck_out_tongue: I hear thefro gives out random hugs lol

#23

ooh, i think i got one at the wrap party… yaaayyy… mr g deserves one fo sho…

#24

On saturday(1977): We begin to recive talks from the two top teams at the regional about going on an alliance with them. We go to our first match. Our robot rams full speed into another robot on our alliance in auton. We lift the robot up about 4 in. When we strart driving around after auton, Our trailer comes off, costing us the match.It came off becuase the trailer hitch got bent. Ok, we move on. Next match, We get through auton without incident, but half way through teleop, we lose connection to the feild. We still won the match, but it was our last match. We don’t get picked during the alliance selections. We end up ranking 21st out of 48 and become 4th in line for robot replacements in the elims.

#25

GSR:

Our robot was re-inspected before the elimination rounds and during that time our digital sidecar became unplugged. The field had communication, but the orange light was not blinking. This technical difficulty on our part caused to robot movement, and we were an easy target. Team 1276 and 87 did an amazing job at putting up a fight but our trailer was full. In the next match since we did not have an autonomous in the first match, 87 flew across the field and pushed us back in front of the opposing human player at the outpost and he scored a ton of shots on us. We thought that we would be out of the way in time before the would come in that direction.

We lost both matches and our team felt so bad because these were our errors.

#26

Though there was a very definite series of unfortunate events that cost 1712 this year on Archimedes, I think a better example is perhaps from a couple years ago while I was with 116.

It came on Galileo back in 2007. The qualifications were a bit rough, with 116 facing 10 opponents (11 if you count the fact we faced #1 seed 1425 twice) who were in the elimination matches and only having one partner who did the same. Match 68, where we score 6 tubes but ultimately only have 2 points due to spoilers and penalties, sums up pretty well the qual matches. Needless to say we didn’t seed in the top 8 (3-4 record, 54th seed) despite being one of top individual competitors.

We were picked 6th by 1595 and were joined by one of my favorite teams in FIRST, 93. We became the only alliance to stop the Thunderchickens before Einstein since 2004 when we defeated 2272, 45, and 217 in quarters.

The semis where the real unfortunate events begin. We squeak out a victory in match 1 against 173, 1902, and 1319. Match two was much rougher, with what we referred to as the cursed spider foot (4 distinct scoring attempts resulted in tubes on the ground) and a massive row of 7 for the other alliance. We spoiled their row (cutting it into two rows of 3) and placed a single tube. If we had went back to 93s ramps earlier and not bothered with the tubes we might have won 30-16, instead of losing 16-2. The worst part was when 1595 lost their arm to a (completely legal) hit by 1319 at the end of the match, costing our alliance one of our scoring machines.
The third match involved 1595 attempting to play defense without their arm. With hindsight being 20/20, we should have opted to replace them with #1 back-up 1382 (a defensive ramp-bot) who would have likely filled this defensive role better. 1595 accidentally de-scored an opposing tube while defending 173, which resulted in a 10-point penalty. Going into the end of the match, both 116 and 1595 are on 93s platforms, which raise into the air. With only seconds left it appears both will receive bonus points, but then 1595 slides off as time expires, falling to the ground. We were still leading with 116’s bonus points and our rack scores, but the penalty from earlier flipped the outcome of the match, and helped the other alliance advance to the Galileo finals (and eventually to Einstein).

How is matchmaking done at competitions? (Kind of a rant)
#27

Team 3062 had a couple unfortunate events at the Championship.

  1. Our first match after lunch on Friday, one team wasn’t paying attention to the clock and didn’t get their robot or human player to the field in time. So, it was a 2-on-3 match. What hurt even more is that we were paired with 1218, Vulcan Robotics, with their Taz Robot (an awesome robot). Without that human player, there were two bins of balls that never made it onto the crater for them to pick up and score.

  2. During one of our Saturday qualifying matches, the other alliance launched a super cell at the end of the match, it missed one trailer, bounced off a robot and landed in one of our alliance trailers. We lost the match by 3 points, 91 - 88. Fantastic match!

  3. Our last unfortunate event was after the match stopped, we were winning 60 - 54 with the RealTime Scoring. After the official score, we lost 58 - 68. It was the first time I saw a score go down, without penalties.

#28

That reminds me…
Another one we had was during a qualification match against a high seeded team… we were in the queing area when the match before us finished…
Unbeknownst to any of us, one of our alliance HP had to go get something…
and didnt make it back in time. So there was an outpost with a full set of moon rocks the whole entire time.
We lost the match (its alright though) and went to talk to there team to see what happened. He was held up by other teams moving their robots to the pit and queing area…and by the time he got back, they wouldnt allow him on the field…Its really unfortunate!

#29

With rocks being scored so quickly that happened a couple of time in our favor. We would be down 10-12 points, and come off with the win after the official count. Unfortunately in happened in favor on the Archimedes champs in the first round of the finals. The real time score had us up 14, but after the official count we lost by 2. You win some you loose some.:slight_smile: The next round wasn’t close.

#30

There’s no way you let us down…you’re being too hard on yourself. In the first match we lost together we lost a drive chain near the beginning of the match and were left limping around and not scoring well. Things happen in FIRST just like they do in real life. It’s all good!

Our first unfortunate event caused us our only loss of the Pittsburgh regional. Unfortunately we never replaced the fuse in the spike with a resettable breaker. For those that know our machine you also know that meant we couldn’t open our flap or flip our hood to score any moon rocks. We lost that match 87 - 71 with us holding about 13 moon rocks.

The next real unfortunate event came Saturday morning on Archimedes. It was our last match of the day and we were going up against 1 of the 2 undefeated teams in our division 2354. Well I went and connected the controls up as I usually would making sure the cables were out of the way. Long story short somehow the serial cable became disconnected between the end of autonomous and the beginning of tele-op. Thankfully my drivers didn’t waste time panicking and listened as I not so calmly told them the cable is unplugged ;). We went on to win the match, but not without much stress.

#31

I’m sorry if I mentioned 3009. I really meant to say 3007.

#32

Freshman year in 07 we went to the NYC regional. Things were going really well for us when we were selected as the overall 2nd pick. When the 2nd round came by, the next selection was another ring scorer.

We did awesome in the QF’s. Won our first SF match with a decently large margin. Then the second match almost right in the beginning, our human player threw a tube onto our flag. We couldn’t remove it and we couldn’t keep scoring for it would incur a rather large multitube holding penalty. We play defense and wait to just climb the ramps of 522, our alliance captain. We climb the ramps, we are cheering like mad because we think we are in the finals. We then see a referee huddle, and are not happy. The refs make a call that the RAMP we were on, was somehow supported at the bottom by a tube. We took a snapshot of this claim and hushed up not arguing with them (we don’t argue calls). We figure if we really deserve to win, we’ll win the next match. In the first seconds of teleop in SF match 3, our human player once again, scores a ring on our flag. Needless to say, being the main tube scorer on our alliance, we lost that match. The opposing alliance- a team we started and mentored lol 1302.:o

We showed the picture and match video to the NJ refs the next day, their call: we would have gotten the bonus points if they had been making the call. Being the honorable team they are, 1302 came over to our pit after winning the regional and gave our human player one of their medals, it was his senior year. Its one of the reasons I love mentoring teams, you get to see what nontechnical things they learned from you.

C’est la vie.

Match vids on TBA Semifinals NYC- http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/team/11/2007

#33

2009(with team 2228):

-We used a fisher price motor for our ground pick up mechanism (basically a conveyer belt with poly cord and wedge top) and we had a couple jams and some breaker trips.

-Once at the Hartford Regional in Coneticutt we accidentally plugged the joysticks into the wrong usb ports so i (co-pilot/shooter mechanism) was driving and our driver was turning our turret. It took us almost the entire match to figure out what was wrong, mainly do to the fact that our traction control wasn’t working and the wheels wouldn’t turn till i pressed the trigger.

-Also at Hartford we had a communication error with the field (our “guess” seeing it worked fine tethered and our wifi block was on out at the field) and the field hands wouldn’t let us back on the field, despite the huge window of time before alliance pickings. As a result we had a greatly deminished chance of being picked, and weren’t, because we couldn’t prove to the other teams there wasn’t a problem with our robot.

2008(with team 1930):

-Last year at Finger Lakes we forgot to plug in power to the left CIM motors so we just spun in place and had a group slap because of this incident.

-Also we ended up having another robot puncture our side plating (32nd inch aluminum just so we had a place to put our sponsors)

-And finally we had a hard hit with another robot and our claw mechanism that knocked of one half of our claw because we forgot to put the final welds on it and it was only tack welded.

#34

This year we only had one on field failure during a non-practice match. In Match 58 on Curie we were playing the Thunder Chickens. We knew that we’d need to play hard defense to win the match. 60 seconds into the match we held their alliances to 20 points when we hit them head on to help our partner pin them. Apparently we went hit them we jarred our master ground connection loose and the robot died completely… We still tied the match 58-58.

#35

well, our robot was fine this season, but i cut my finger open on a moving chain/sprocket. that was a fun way to spend Thursday at nationals. So i went to Atlanta, all ready to play frisbee the whole time, and the first day i injure my throwing finger, and didn’t get to play at all. Now, two weeks later, i still don’t have full feeling in that finger…

#36

Only I would get stung by a wasp while trying to dismantle our pit after the Palmetto regional. I guess that’s why they want you to wear gloves; the rogue wasp in Littlejohn Coliseum!:rolleyes:

#37

In seeding matches, 3 things killed us:
we had a harvester of pvc pipes on our front with just a thin cardboard like sponsor board, and during auto, playing in the center pos, we rammed into another robot so that their edge hit our harvester, and our harvester fell apart and prevented us from moving (we took a video of our matches from our camera, and you can see it collide with us very hard!) the programmers changed it to turn and then go forward slowly in auto after that
We put in a dead battery (6V?) and crawled
we were downloading the movies from the robot, and we had to go up, so we took the laptop to the staging area, finished, but forgot to plug in our WGA, and our light was BLINK.BLINK.BLINK.BLINK the match as we got scored apon

#38

In a semi finals match, in the third match, we had a bad battery and our robot didn’t go anywhere.

#39

During the qualifying rounds at the Arizona Regionals, our robot actually caught on fire! We couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it, so we rewired it to see if that would make it stop smoking. Our alliance won that match, but it counted as a loss for our team because we didn’t move at all. We found out later that it was our jaguar that caught fire and we didn’t have to rewire the robot. Even though we lost that match horribly, we still got chosen by the number 1 seed to move on to the finals. We did awesome in those and ended up winning!

#40

WATCHDOG! We kept getting it in the worst matches and we checked and rechecked the code and there wasnt anything wrong with it from what we could tell.