I remember my second ever match on the drive team. We got the dreaded “Turn Your Robot On” index card. So as I went and re-positioned our robot. As I’m turning back to go off the field, a referee gently taped me on the shoulder and reminded me to still turn the robot on. :o
In 2010, my rookie year I was opening this plexi lid on our robot to test the battery voltage, and I broke the plexi lid. We taped it back together, and come match time, we went over a bump and the plexi bent inwards and turned off our robot via the power switch.
My nickname is tap. Ive broken 5 on one job, dont feel bad hahaha.
One word… WatchDog
we just could not get this little bugger to work for us. and we were young enough to not know how to disable or work around it…
this was a funny moment of that same year…
Person: Hey, can you take a look at the code? the robot seems to be going a little slow.
Programmer: Sure.
-walks into the pit and over to the drive station. pushes both joysticks full forward and the robot jumps out of the pit, ripping the eathernet cord out-
Programmer: … … … That seemed to be going pretty fast to me.
<lesson learned> put on blocks… ALWAYS </lesson learned>
Last year, at Championships, we were getting ready to play a match and the MC wanted to do the wave. He was on the field and said “one, two, three GO” and the starter hit the Start button and all the robots proceeded to move in Auto. I didn’t thnk he could move that fast to get off the field.
Leaving the battery in during weighing and not turning the robot on.
Lefty-Loosey always eludes at least one kid each year.
So this is Tyler Olds favorite story to tell about me, though I wan’t the only one doing it at the time…
Back when I was a freshman on 93 I was recruited to be the teams welder. I had several years experience welding but had never done TIG welding. So one night a group of us were trying to get some practice in on some new metal the shop teacher had just purchased. Nothing we did would make an arc. I mean we tried everything, change welding machines, change the gas, clean the metal, you name it we tried it. Well, after about 2 hours I had to leave, as I’m packing up my school stuff the mentor who was helping us calls me back into the shop and proceeds to show the group what he had just found… The metal had a thin clear plastic wrap on it to protect it. That is why we couldn’t get an arc… Needless to say I still get needled about it today 12 years later.
So always check your metal for a protective covering before trying to weld!
We always ask the freshmen for:
A aluminum magnet
A bucket of Steam
Left handed screw driver
Left handed wrench
We sometimes get one who looks for 10 minutes and then begins to ask mentors where they can find one.
This might not exactly be a rookie mistake but at Championships this year on one of the fields I remember a match right after a long break was halted. Turns out one of the little vacuuming robots got stuck under the bridge without anyone noticing and was being destroyed by robots attempting to balance. It was really funny when they pulled it out.
One of my rookie mistakes my freshmen year was during an inspection. The inspector was questioning one of our gear-tooth sensors and told us we needed to remove it. So as a nervous freshman I immediately cut all the wires to get it off of the robot. Turned out it was completely legal after all and I spent a good half hour putting it back in. I learned to think before acting after that incident. I also learned to cut electrical components in a way that might make them salvageable in the future.
At the Championships, right after the B.E.P. concert we lost a rookie freshmen.
He went to use the restroom, and when we came back in the arena, it was clearing out. Our team had already left, and when we did a head count, found he was missing. It took about 45 minutes for us to find him, on the back far side of the staduim outside. At our end of season banquet, he did win for best rookie team member, and for a prize and we gave him a compass and a whistle.
What is wrong with Team 422’s robot in this video?
If you answered “Some idiot freshman in the pit forgot to reconnect the radio before the match, causing the team to lose a match they should have won, boosting them from 4th alliance captain to 2nd alliance captain, allowing them to meet 2753 in the finals and get destroyed instead of the semifinals,” then I would respond with “No, I don’t know what you are talking about. No, no, no, it wasn’t me, I swear! I just personally check the radio before every match now and will continue to do so for no reason at all.” :o
My boys built a mini-bot for one of the local teams. It could climb the pole in 2.5 seconds. It never scored a single point at Lone Star because each time it was deployed, this happened…
Did that just hit your roller claw? That’s really kinda funny…unfortunate, but funny.
Yes, they left the claw down instead of flipping it back out of the way 
. My boys started to cry and walked out of the convention hall after the second time it happened. If I recall correctly, only a few mini-bots from teams like 118 could beat it.
Not my own, but there was a rookie team I ran into at the 2004 Sacramento that had not realized that there was a ship date until they got an email the Friday before. The entire team thought they had until the competition to build. They had to build a crate and robot in ~3days. They called it the 72 hour robot. I believe we referred to it as “the plywood box with wheels.” It was mostly wood, with a pair of window motors direct mounted to the two drive wheels. They had taped paper signs onto the sides with their team number and school name. The team ended up as an alliance captain that year, if I remember correctly.
Of my own teams’ “rookie” mistakes:
- Not removing our safety strap that held down a spring-loaded arm of our only scoring mechanism in 2005 during a Quarter Final match
- Several battery attachment/mounting issues that resulted in a dead robot
- A robot cart so tall and narrow it was a hazard
- Not including a good regulating mechanism between our hopper and shooter in 2006. Very few balls were fired when intended.
- Wheels with so much friction that the drive motor fuses tripped within a second of driving. We thought it was a communication issue. Hint: 1/2" thick neoprene is not a great wheel tread.
Oh I forgot one.
In 2008 two kids were checking our electronics board with this little mini flash light. Long story short, they forgot to take it out and left it in the drive train. We were really confused when our robot wouldn’t move, and why there was a bright light shining from the bottom of the robot. This cost us an elimination match.
Yeah, we are on our game. Still not too many ‘rookie’ mistakes here.
We left a parent-mentor behind at a rest area in the middle of the night. Counted the students getting back on the bus, but not the adults. So we called his cell phone to tell him we noticed he wasn’t there and we’d be back - only to hear the phone in his bus seat start ringing.
Rookie year 2008 Overdrive…
So…imagine…here we are, very first practice match FRC Overdrive. 25 PantherBots screaming in joy as their robot takes off and does its ‘drive straight, turn left’ routine. Make it through the match and the refs disable the bots…
Two student drivers and the robot coach (an actual team coach/mentor) go out on the field to get their bot…as the students are carrying the robot off the field a referee walks over to the robo coach with a double-handful of nuts and bolts and says, ‘I think you lost these…’ robo coach accepts offering of bolts, picks one randomly, hands it back to the ref and says “No, this one isn’t ours…”
Needless to say we haven’t forgotten the Lock-tite or nylocks since…:rolleyes:
At work last week, a couple of us were making a run out to retrieve something that was left by one of the machine shops. As we’re leaving, my boss says “Hey, while you’re out there, tell the shop that we need a stringer stretcher.” (A board stretcher is a close approximation.) I start cracking up as soon as my coworker is out of sight around a corner, make some comment to my boss about sending newbies after the metric left-handed crescent wrench, and head out.
We quickly found the item we needed to retrieve, and I waited for a few minutes before my coworker came out of the shop. “They don’t know what a stringer stretcher is.” At which point, I filled him in that he’d been pranked. I think we got a couple of the other guys with a similar mission later.