Let’s just say there’s a reason they give teams two of the trophy… 4 hours after winning our Excellence In Engineering award, we broke one of the towers off. This is why we don’t let programmers touch the hardware.
Clearly a mechanical problem
You have duct tape, no?
This happened to us a few years back. We wired it up with some red, white, and blue LEDs and epoxied it back together as a display piece.
We’ve had this happen a bunch of times, five minute epoxy works ok if you’re just putting it on a shelf.
Acrylic Adhesive available at any sign or plastics shop makes it good as new. Always a hardware issue. Programmers will always blame hardware that it wasnt made for typical use. lol
I was thinking about that.
The other thing I am thinking is “ugh, they changed the trophies AGAIN!” I don’t like mismatched trophies.
One of ours broke, too. It was a parent who broke it though.
I’m a programmer and I know how fragile hardware can be without appropriate safeguards. That’s why I remind everyone who touches one of the trophies to carry it by the base, not by the upright pieces. Gravity should work for you, not against you.
Use it to recruit new members. A few years ago, we were at an event where we were letting the incoming freshmen at our school drive the robot, but the robot was tethered, so when one freshman drove forward too fast, it pulled the computer of the table, knocking some trophies into the floor and breaking them. The story goes that she felt so bad about breaking our trophies that she joined the team. She is now one of our most dedicated and valuable members of the team. The moral of the story, we decided, it’s that we need more people to break our trophies.