Hello! I’d like to know if any members of the CD community experienced any funny moments this season. Personally, we had a couple of them, but here’s the one that stood out the most. One day, when I was testing the autonomous, it was never working when I put values of 1, 5, 10, 100, etc. At 10 000, it barely budged. So I decided to insert 1 000 000 000 000 as the value and guess what happened … The robot went right into the wall! The engineering team was like : “Oh no! I hope nothing’s broken!” And us, the programming team, we were like : “It worked!” Anyways, let’s hear your stories!
The whole season the designers of the drive frame and our swerve drive kept saying “it can run on 3 wheels if it breaks”. 3rd to last match of qualifiers we receive a catapult shot to the swerve module completely destroying it’s sensors and the cim motor. By the time of our last match our robot was driving on 3 wheels.
The whole team was cracking up as it rocked back and forth on the field driving for the most part as if it still had 4 wheels with 20 pound’s of chain zip-tied to the apposing side. As the design team behind it is saying told you so. Best part of competing this year.
Our robot almost went down the gym stairs… DURING A BASKETBALL GAME!!! That would have been a fun game to be at! :yikes: :ahh:
Best part of the story: I’d love to be in the thirdend-to-last match.
We were at OKC regional and we had just made an early and long drive. Our team decides to look for our pit without using the map, They find it and setup. Once pit scouting begins I see people are freaking out and pointing to the map of the pits. I walk over and see that they accidently put 1986 instead of 2950.
So for a few minutes everyone was freaking out “OMG Did titanium change there name.” Everyone thought we were Team Titanium for like an hour. We finally got that number changed on the board. But never the less I was once apart Team Titanium for a whole hour.
Our Programmer decided that he wanted to test out the driving, so he grabbed the joystick and drove it into a wall. Sheared every rivet on our intake…20 minute fix. All this was the day after the robot ran into the wall in auto, bending our forks AND shearing rivets too.
Our new motto: “Every mechanical issue can be related back to programming.”
It looks like that the same thing happened to you guys, too. We were just a bit luckier…
Our programmer must like driving into walls…Or he likes making the mechanical team work…
I like both …
One night of Build season we were having an issue with getting our drive working, and we eventually found the issue in our wiring. Our head programmer then ran around the room yelling “it wasn’t a programming issue! Woooo!” You can tell we usuly give him a hard time.
There was the ball prank that happened to us at the MAR District Championship and then we took 316’s robot and hid from them after they left. They found it easily enough. Personally, I don’t have any funny stories this season, cus everything worked on the first try programming wise, except for gyro functions. The only thing that happened when making those functions is that the robot spun around.
At the PNW District Championships, the FTAs swapped a few of the teams’s robots before the pits were opened. I remember seeing someone from 360 walk in, stare at the robot for a few seconds, walk out, then walk back in to make sure it was actually happening.
Our electrical team was being creative. They made a Stripper Pole!
Basically a piece of conduit, some zip ties, then hung their “wire” strippers on it.
After a day of qual. matches were over, and myself and some other scouters were packing up our tablets and whatnot, one of them says to the lead scout: “I think I messed up during one of the matches.” The lead scout responded with: “Well then we may as well just THROW ALL THE DATA AWAY.”
Welcome aboard.
In 2012 we had one of our mentors move to Texas. While tooling around the Lone Star pits in his favorite green shirt he ran into a couple of 118 students who happened to be at their third regional still looking to qualify for champs.
While walking through pits, two members saw the shirt, and in a panicked voice, “What, Team Titanium is here?”.
Of course we would have said the same thing had the roles been reversed and 118 suddenly showed up. Was much nicer teaming up for the win in KC this year.
You have no idea how many times the same thing happened to me! The instant something goes wrong with the robot, everyone stares at me and tells me to go over my code again. And you know what? Out of all the times something went wrong, there was only one programming issue. The rest were usually electrical issues.
During one of our practice matches at Buckeye one of our encoders was unplugged. The robot reacted by turning straight towards a group of judges and shooting the ball at them. The worst (or best, depending on your view) part was that none of them were paying attention when it shot.
Ha ha ha … do you, by any chance, have a video of that?
I don’t personally have any video (I was driving and not expecting it to mess up) and I don’t think anyone bothers to record practice matches. I’ll have to get someone to record them in the future just in case something like that happens again
Three programming stories:
We were testing autonomous, and it was supposed to drive to a certain distance from the wall using a control loop, but no matter ho much we mangled the code, it always drove backward into a wall. Nothing broken, but it took a long time to fix that to drive forward.
Then, in the second to last match, we discovered a prescaler in the code to slow the robot down for safety. Once removed, it worked so much better!
We finally got our autonomous working perfectly… after the very last match!