Biggest Mistake You Have Ever Made

VEX V5 General Discussion
1

I think we should all share the biggest mistakes we have ever made in robotics to learn from each other.

I’ll start. In the IQ state championship, we did 1 of our skills run and didn’t get our maximum score(foreshadowing). Also didn’t do auton. Then our qual matches started and we kinda crashed out because we were doing bad. We ended up getting second in finals. There was 1 teams that double qualified and we needed 5 teams to make worlds. So they looked at the skills standing but the second and third place teams in skills also qualified for worlds. So the fourth place team in skills qualified. We were one point away from 4th. We probably would have made it if we used our other skills tries.

Lesson learned, always do your skills runs

2

Not having a lady brown mech in high stakes and proceeding to lose in quarterfinals because we outscored them on mobile goals but the controlled all of the wall stakes.

3

(v5) Somehow during states, before R16 our rubber bands on our intake got taken off. So long story short, we blew a decent chance of going to worlds because of rubber bands (also, our partners drivetrain broke, so that didn’t help)

4

Over the summer last year, I tried building a revolver and failed, but tried again during the school year, wasting time that could have been spent not building something that did not end up working.

5

It wasn’t a complete loss. Documenting failures in the notebook is a “secret” strategy to make an award-winning notebook!

6

This story has a lot of backstory

In high stakes, I was a middle schooler in Connecticut. This region was obviously extremely uncompetitive. Throughout the competition season, you could look at the comp results and see 3 teams that always made finals/won the big awards. These were 8878C, 8878E, and 99088V (us). 8878E and C would always alliance together, and we would always be 1-3 seed. Every single competition, my team was just a little bit worse than either of them. We ended up beating them once and winning a tourney, but only because we were carried by our alliance (10102Y). We ended the qualifier season with a disappointing semis exit when our robot was immediately disabled by our opponent, after placing low in quals due to multiple scoring reliability issues and drive sides locking up.

After the final competition, we locked in. We completely redesigned and built our robot in 3 weeks (the first time of any team from our org), as well as studied 8878C and E’s game strategy. We showed up to states, and were working better than ever before. We went 9-1, with our only loss being due to our auto scoring an opposing color top ring. In our last 2 matches, we faced 8878C back to back. Our first match against them was a dominant 19-0 win, with the team that we would end up picking for our alliance. Our second match against them was a true 1v1, due to our respective alliances immediately disabling themselves. We were able to also take that win off of auto and a few extra rings scored.

Finally, it was time for elims. 8878C and E were the 1 seed and we were the 2 seed (therefore earning us a bye). Quarters was a pretty easy win against 2 new/nearly new teams, and our semis opponents were 99088D and 42863M. These 2 teams were easily the next best, and had been improving greatly throughout the season. 99088D in particular was the other experienced team of 8th graders from my org, and many of us from 99088V had been on teams with their members in the past.

The match started with an unfortunate auto loss for us, but we were able to make it back. We and our alliance had a 3 stack in both positive corners. Then, 42863M drops a full mobile goal right next to me. We were being defended by 99088D, but we had a 600 rpm 2.75" drive and they had a 200 rpm 3.25" drive, so we could outmaneuver them. I made the risky move to grab the goal, and it paid off. I was able to get back in the corner without 99088D being able to take our goal. However, in their attempt to take it, they had pushed us into the goal. On this robot, I had made the design choice to have the 11w wall stake motor protruding from the lady brown structure. This meant that when we were pushed into the goal, our motor hooked on to the top. At 33 seconds left in the match, I made it to the negative corner. However, in doing so, I had pulled our own goal out of the corner while holding another goal. This was an SG6 violation, and we ended up being DQ’ed in semis as a result of my actions. The score was 0-6.

When we got the news and walked off the field, 8878E and C were right next to us because of how they were doing elim queuing. I distinctly remember hearing someone from 8878C excitedly shout that “Venus got dqed!”. They went on to dominate finals.

Thankfully, we were able to qualify for worlds off of the skills dropdown list. It was a fantastic and super fun season, but this one moment has haunted me ever since it happened.

7

In Push Back, my team somehow didn’t realize that our outtake prevented our robot from reaching the loaders. We had to remove the outtake entirely a week before a competition.

8

Oof that is ROUGH. So many teams got DQd from those corner rules, but not being able to back out of it is just tragic

9

even tho it was our alliance’s sg10 violation, getting dq arts div finals 3 at worlds against world champion

10

OOFF that really sucks

11

During Push Back, we used a TON of hot glue, and on the day before our competition, the rule was changed so that you couldn’t have hot glue. No one checked the game manual, and we thought it was fine. (It gets chaotic here) We get to the competition, and we go to inspection with Philip, our bot, and the inspector is like:

"You guys are all good"

And we’re happy, and we make it to Elimination rounds. Just before the second to last qualifier round begins, one of the guys running the competition says we need to remove our hot glue to continue. We are shocked, and we immediately pull the hot glue off and we secure it with zip-ties.

let’s just say it was a rough round.

12

Either a 5 person team, 2 drivers, and a 4 wheel/ motor drive terrain in pushback on green 200​:wilted_flower:

13

not checking rec library (back in the good ol days with recf:)

we immediately disqualified from being a contender for innovate bc our innovate form was the older version… keep in mind this was states

14

Not doing research on meta bots before building ours- we usually start in august, and decided for pushback that we’re better then everyone else (we didn’t even get picked for bracket play :frowning: )