Remember that time you gashed yourself open with your robot? When it ran over your foot? When it required blood sacrifice? Well post those stories here!
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Legend tells of a robot, long ago, that had so many mechanisms on it that when it was turned on, it imploded. The bent steel shaft still hangs on our Wall of Shame in our shop
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Oh man. Was anyone in Duluth a few years ago when my team’s bot had to be extinguished? It was such a sad day, but in hindsight, we can laugh.
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My team has a T-Shirt cannon robot, witch we use for assemblys and outreach events. I’m known as the robot wrangleer as I go out with the robot. It was a job that was originally screated to make sure the robot don’t hit anyone, and to reload the shirts, but it turned into more of a hype job. Anyway, during one of our assemblys I was running out along side the robot when it cut across in front of me, and I handnt noticed. I plowed over it, ripping my arm open, onto the floor in front of the whole school. You could say it was somewhat trematic 
. I actually wrote my college easy on it.
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Well, traumatic experiences always make for great essays!
Imploded? And I thought spontaneous disassembly was bad…
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Four broken robots 2018 2nd seed Galileo eliminations…
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The wooden robot will always get back at you… Always.
This isn’t a true horror story, but during one of our matches a few years back, we needed to have a counterweight for our climber. Well, having nothing else to use, we decided to use an old battery. However, at one point during the match, the counterweight battery had shaken loose and fell out of our bot. Everybody was super confused because we were running a robot from which a battery had fallen out
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Funny horror stories when taken from the point of the refs and the announcer!
We laid a toddler out on his back with the 2014 ball at a high level sponsor event. Our bot used a catapult that could launch the ball across the field, so it hit HARD.
Kid was OK but it sure put a damper on the demo…
We laid a toddler out on his back with the 2014 ball at a high level sponsor event. Our bot used a catapult that could launch the ball across the field, so it hit HARD.
And I thought we did some risky things… But shooting a kid… Hmm…
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This is also not a true horror story, but my team once won an Excellence in Engineering award with a black bar (or something like that) that was bent for half the competition. It still is in our loft next to legendary items such as the Cheesy Poofs bag with 2 Poofs in it.
Prototyping our 2017 shooter, someone suggested we try a kinda sling shot launcher design. We made it out of spare metal bits and used surgical tubing for tension. On the first test shot, the piece of 1/8th aluminum angle that held the ball detached itself from the mechanism and launched with so much force that it hit the wall just under the roof of our 24 ft tall shop hard enough to chip a cinder block. It was not fired again.
2017 offseason, we decided we wanted to make a mechanism that could kick a regulation distance field goal. The mechanism we made had super high torque springs and held a lot of power. The base of the kicker was kinda small and required two people to stand on the edge and hold it down. When our lead mentor pulled it back and let it go, it slammed forward right into the foot of one of the holders. It tore through his shoe and cut his foot pretty good. Luckily we have 3 medically trained mentors and he was just fine. He was a new student though, and he never came back again.
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Well… Why didn’t you cut yourself on it before? We all know that robots require blood sacrifice to work.
(That’s sad he didn’t come back, but I mean, if my first robotics experience was that traumatic, I don’t know if I would want to be in FTC and FRC…)
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Wait … Is blood sacrificing not a regular thing. We have a whole ritual before bag day. FRC really screwed that up for 2020.
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2018 I left a loose pwm wire hanging after a quick rewire while we were in que. It decided to touch the exposed 12v 40 amp contact on one of our spark motor controllers. Apparently neither the wire nor the Rio could take that much current.
Last year, my team decided to build a shooter in order to launch cubes into the scale. It worked quite well, however it was terrifying to watch. It had four pneumatic wheels hooked up to four redlines that would spin at full power. So it was very loud and very terrifying for anyone with in 100 feet, but hey it worked. During one of our matches, we decided to test our auto for the scale, which worked fairly well. However, we selected the wrong auto at the beginning of the match. So instead of turning towards the scale upon reaching midfield, it turned towards the wall of the field, pointed directly at the line of judges sitting 10 feet away. Now let me tell ya, it is absolutely horrifying to see your robot pointed at a row of judges and wheels spinning up to 4000 rpm. Judges began running for their lives right as our robot launched a cube at them. Luckily, the cube nicked the field wall and bounced straight up. But everyone on our drive team had heart attacks and the judges were scared to get near our robot following that incident
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