Robot game year - 2001 Goal/ramp/balancing
Let’s just say when we lifted the goal to be set on the ramp, the driver wasn’t all the way forward as he should have been and therefore, when we drove backwards (the ramp was sitting on our wheels) the goal wasn’t on the ramp far enough and it fell. luckily the alliance partner pulled forward as SOON as they saw it dropping and SAVED THE DAY!!! YAY!!!
Hmm…last year at the Motorola Regionals, during one of the seeding matches, our robot got into a tug of war with another robot (honestly can’t remember which…) Two tug of wars, actually, since both bots could grab two goals. Well…our robot ended up being pushed against the side rail, and somehow drove over some balls so that it was only on one wheel (the wheel against the side rail). Despite this, the other robot STILL couldn’t take the goals from us! It was awesome!
Team 830 GO RAT PACK!!!
An engineer, a rookie of course, made a bet with me that the robot would NOT weigh over 130 lbs. Of course, I’m gonna take this bet because I’m a veteran robotics girl and i know good and well the robot will weigh over 130. (Especially since he was dead set on puttin all these steel parts on the robot, one of which was a HUGE steel bumper.) SO anyway., for every pound overweight we are, that’s the dollar amoount of dinner that he owed me. So it turns out we are like 30 or 40 lbs overweight, a $40 dinner for me! Yay for me!!! Of course that bumper comes to be named - yes you got it - Veronica’s dinner.
Oh yeah and at dinner, the most hilarious phone prank ever. On the guy sitting a few chairs from me at the table! HIlarious!!!
We got stuck up against two robots in st. louis cause or alliance was dead, and actually won with a qf score of 90.
This happened when I was a freshman back in 2000 at the J&J mid-atlantic regional. We started off with two-wheel drive tank steering, which we had never tested on the carpet. In our first few practice matches, it didn’t work. We could go forward, but we couldn’t turn, and when we tried to turn, our traction caused us to nearly rip up the carpet. The judges told us we had to do something about it or we would be disqualified for damaging the field.
We removed the treads on the non-drive wheels. Now we didn’t rip up the carpet anymore, but we were not maneuverable at all, and we lost our first several matches. By the end of the first day, we were close to dead last place.
The nexy day, someone realized that we needed to replace our non-drive wheels with casters. But where do we get casters? We checked small parts, but they didn’t have any. Finally, someone came up with a brilliant idea: our CART had casters. So we traded casters for wheels. Now, instead of a non-turning robot and a maneuverable cart, we had a turning robot and a non-turning cart.
It then became clear that we were amazingly fast. We consistently beat our opponents to the opposite side of the field to grab both black balls. In one match we went from 34th seed to 19th seed. We slowly climbed up the rankings.
For our last qualifying match, we knew that ChiefDelphi was going to be one of the robots. We all hoped that they would be our partner, because they had an amazing robot. When the alliance was announced, we were disappointed to learn that we were going to be on opposing alliances. We all thought we were going to lose. 5 seconds before the end of the match, the ChiefDelphi alliance was barely ahead of us. Both of their robots were hanging from the bar. We flew up the ramp and slammed into CD’s partner. It started swinging back and forth on the bar, then FELL. But now it was on the ramp, which still counted for 5 points and would have won the match. But their robot was top-heavy and had a stabilizing wheel on the back, which at the end of the match was touching the ground off the ramp, so they didn’t get the 5 points, and we won the match.
We made it into elims and won the regional, then won the Philadelphia regional the next week.
So much fun to go from dead last to first place 
In Sacramento the team next to us in the pits was 295, they’re so kool. Out of all their matches they only lost 3 and one of them was to us (133 to 37). I just think it’s great that we beat such an awesome team.
MY Story is how at the KSC regional last year i got locked out of my hotel room and broke the window and had to be rushed to the hospital for 23 staples and having to spend the saturday of the comp in a wheel chair
Beat That
*Originally posted by whooper94 *
** it was determined a motor was wired backwards causing one joystick to have its controls reversed, **
We had a similar problem to this where when I would drive forward with the joystick the corect wheel would go forward, however if I moved the left joystick backwards, the right wheel would go backwards and if I moved the right stick backwards, the left wheel would go backwards. Being the programmer as well, I thought it was something wrong with the program. I spent over an hour looking at code trying to figure it out before I discovered that each of the two drive motors have been wired to two different Victors.
Yup I’ll say it
The Year 2002
RiverRage 6 Final
Ask someone on 121 what happened cuse they still don’t know;)
we were playing mafia friday night in sacramento at the hotel, and i was mafia, but i forgot, so when she said “Mafia, wake up.” I just sorta sat there until she tapped me and i got up and said “Oh… Yeah.”
and then everyone smacked me for screwing up the game
and then we went back to leann’s room and had a giant pillowfight. was fun
Of course we coughKylecough would never solder things in a hotel room.
:rolleyes:
Wetzel
Oh yeah...the smoke detector...Slept in til 4:45 AM the Sunday my team was suppose to leave Houston to go back to Michigan… Almost didn’t make it to the airport cuz I almost missed the bus…once I got there, I was really hungry so I grabbed some stuff from a store. I thought I heard something about a final boarding at gate A25 but I ignored it. I hung out with 4 other team members who apparently didn’t hear the announcement either.
Then they were like,
‘what time is it? We board at 6:30…our flight leaves pretty soon…Jason?’
‘Uh yeah…it’s…7AM…’
Well, needless to say, we sprinted to our gate and made it
The moral: Boarding time over your stomach 
LA regional this year- we’re coming down the ram with our arm raised when a wedge shaped robot runs into us head on. Our driver made the mistake of continuing forward, and because our arm was raised and we were on the ramp we tipped over onto our arm. Fortunately we designed for this contingency, so our arm is hinged from the side of the robot it has sufficient toruqe to put us back on our wheels. And it did just that, even though we were flat on our back, wheels pointing directly upwards, our chassis cranked itself right back up and as it passsed vertical it fell onto the wheels.
What we didn’t know until after the match was that our battery had come out of its mount, for most teams this would mean that the battery would be disconnected as soon as they moved, but we were able to finish the match dragging our battery along behind us by its leads because we had a zip-tied the two connectors together. In the video we took you can even see that another robot drove over our battery at one point. It was crazy cool, but not very good for the robot, because the battery smashed the plastic housing of one of our drill motors as it bounced around underneath our robot at one point.
Needless to say, after that we abandoned the practice of using velcro to hold the battery in, building a new mount in the ten or so minutes before the next match.