Whats the strangest bit of damage your robot got? A wire deep inside the robot get pulled apart? Something fell apart yet somehow still worked? Share your things!
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2016 Q57 Southfield
One of the PWM signal lines on a spark motor controller got loose of its zip tie and crossed both the M+ and M- screw terminals. The wire insulation smoked like crazy, we thought it was much much worse than it really was. In our panic and the field staff panic we didnât hit the estop right away. The driver couldnât see what was happening really and didnât know to stop driving so they slammed into the other bot on the pad. A ref finally came over and told them to estop. Definitely was panic inducing and needed the fire extinguisher. âBatmanâ (I think Adam?) the FTA saved the day
It happened right at Endgame. We are on the left side of the field near the gate
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One I saw that caused a card: 1266 protected their breaker well, several inches inside the robot, under a top cover, mounted vertically and pointing to the back of the bot. They took a bumpers hit from another robot, who popped up and hit it. How? Iâm not sure anyone will ever know.
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Our 2017 robot had 2 breakers ripped out of our PDP by the tip of the gear lift peg.
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This wasnât my robot but I helped debug it recently. It wasnât anything that happened in a match but rather faulty assembly. A local team was adding some servos to their manipulator and wanted to control them independently. they were installed to run two mirrored mechanisms on their intake and they saw that it was working correctly. I donât know exactly what they noticed that clued them into the fact that things werenât working in exactly the way that they expected, but I do know that at some point they told both of them to do something different but they still did the same thing.
A couple steps of debugging later they determined that even after commenting out one of the servos in their code they still did exactly the same thing. and they then unplugged one of them and still, It did the same thing as its counterpart.
It turned out that they had decided to run both of them on the same power wires and split them again at the other end of the cable harness and they ran the signal wires as a twisted pair. But one of the connectors was improperly assembled and had no connection on the signal wire and as such that wire was floating. as a result the twisted pair acted as a capacitor and caused the disconnected wire to carry the same signal as the one that was properly connected
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The corner of the cargo ship in 2019 destoryed the ethernet port of our RoboRio in playoffs.
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Not exactly âdamageâ but a team I ended up helping at NYC this year was running a drive chassis with mismatched 20 & 30 amp fuses without realizing it causing the entire drive to constantly stop and always turn towards the left. Worked perfectly after that issue was fixed.
In 2007 there was a control system bug which would make your robot unresponsive to commands (including disable) for several seconds. Also in 2007 we built 3 speed transmissions to go real fast. We were one of the first people to uncover this bug when testing those 3 speed transmissions, in high gear of course. We were working in a big open shop floor, but at 20+ ft/s you run out of room quick. Unfortunately the first thing the robot hit was at just the perfect height to destroy like eight brand new Victor speed controllers mounted to the test electronics board.
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Last qual match at champs. At 1:57 in the video, we die after a medium sized hit. Didnât lose comms. Didnât lose CAN. Robot code crashed.
what():
Terminate called after throwing an instance of std::bad_alloc
Thatâs all we got from the DS log. No stack trace. Weâre Java. CSA/FTA had never seen it before. Still donât have an answer or even a clue.
Another team let us know that they got the same error after going over the bump at full speed earlier that day.
ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
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This was our first year going with a brainpan for electronics, and after our two events itâs extremely bent in so many places. In some spots it looks like someone went at it with a hammer, in others it looks like the electronics were yanked at on one side, bending the brainpan where they were mounted. I have no idea what caused this damage, my best guess is the repeated jumps over the charge station but Iâm still not sure how that would cause the amount of damage weâre seeing.
I donât have any pictures, mostly because it was really hard to capture the damage in a picture. Itâs not super noticeable until youâre up close. I want to take off the brainpan to look at the damage, but that would involve unplugging everything so it probably wonât happen.
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Our 2022 botâs ethernet that went from the radio to the switch. The wiring last year was so insanely compact the ethernet had to be within millimeters from the drivetrain chain (as well as the 6awg that went from the pdp to the battery). They touched during sdr I guess, but it still all worked so we were chilling. Pneumatic tubing was also within millimeters of the drivetrain chain
Also in 2020 at DMR we snapped 3/8th poly because of a misaligned climb lmao
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Thatâs been an issue people have seen a few times this year. It generally results from running out of memory on the roboRIO. Iâd check your memory usage in the logs. (The fact that your code didnât come back up is a bit confusing, though.)
In 2022 we were testing traversal in a practice field and somehow we snapped lexan and bent our climber in a box. Thatâs not all, the piece that snapped flew up and almost hit the person managing the practice fields. They came over and handed it to use. Whops 
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During auto at orange county when we went over the cable bump or charge station our pigeon lost power so we rammed into the grid and one of our alliance partners. Then the other alliance partner ran into both of us. After auto we had inverted controls. We somehow managed to score once and dock and engage at the end.
Another one thatâs not my team, but I saw:
At a pre-season scrimmage, a teamâs energy chain from their arm/lift/scoring thingy fell off, landing near their drivetrain. Said drivetrain is mecanum. With protruding bolts.
They were the only robot on the field, and the match being run was stopped about as soon as we saw the energy chain flying to bits. Something about âyou know, we really donât think you want to damage your robot furtherââŚ
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Our entire upper arm inner stage got torqued at least 10°. Twice. The first time we replaced the arm, the second time our lead mentor released the inner âprotective parentâ in him and torqued it back to 0 with the most aggressive twisting movement I have ever seen done by a human.
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At FIN Greenwood, we took a friendly fire hit that torqued our frame. We had to rebuild the entire chassis this time in 1/4â aluminum within 3 days. Take a look at the top left corner of the robot in the picture.
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Last year at Worlds we found tread marks on our 20 inches off the ground limelight 
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Not my team, but this is by far the best Iâve seen during a match: Smokescreen In Action - YouTube
Team had a 1-stage scissor mechanism, with electronics attached on their belly pan and the bottom of the scissor platform. A spike relay came loose from the top and was dangling by the wires, only to get crushed into a CIM motor when the mechanism went down - blew out half their electrical system.
As for other times, 2013 my team had an arm set up with a winch. We had a manual reset process that involved disconnecting some power poles for the winch and hooking them into a modified drill handle so we could power the motor manually. Weâll, someone plugged it into the wrong side on bag day⌠definitely didnât need the stress of rewiring and replacing everything that late in the season!
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Nothing is safe from the black neoprene. You, sir, are next.
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