When building my catapult I inadvertently corkscrewed a shaft 4 times and snapped it in half.
Great time to bring back this thread… Right as i am taking my robot apart. Loctite is annoying to have to take off screws after the year is over…
In our teams first year in robotics, we accidentally twisted an axle, and made it into a screw.
This has happened so many times to me on my catapults in NBN.
In our first prototypes every time we pulled it back we would twist the shaft a little. We became quite frustrated that it would never pull back the entire way until we decided to flesh out the design.
You could just replace the front part if you have as many broken motors to pull parts from as we do.
Last year my teammate broke the front plate of the motor entirely. She was mentally done for that day from trying to get that motor off, so I kindly replaced that part from our reserves.
One night in Toss Up I decided to rebuild my robot. I had taken old robot half apart before I realised it wasn’t my robot…
- Trying to take off a motor by twisting the motor itself after taking out the second screw. I ended up snapping off the entire screw post apparatus of the motor.
- Forgetting to plug in the power expander for the flywheel before a semi-finals match and wondering why it wouldn’t spin.
Some kid in my club couldn’t get a stripped screw out so he smacked it with a hammer then used the ban-saw to try to cut it.
He is so stupid
Also at a competition I saw a guy that tried to compete without a cortex, and when it wasn’t working he was so confused. He was like “oh you HAVE to have a cortex to drive”. I was like “BOY!!”
Such a great thread… Anywho to add: me trying to run countless codes that do nothing because I don’t have a while loop… It isn’t too bad but I’ve done it so many times that it counts…
Left my autonomous out of a while loop in my first 2 competitions, tried 3 cortex’s and decided to restart my code, went back a week later and fixed the original 
YASSSS! I swear RobotC is literally the worst source editor second only to notepad. I wish it was possible to use maybe eclipse or Xcode or even Sublime, but not RobotC.
Had a ratcheting mechanism on our flywheel to keep it coasting after power was cut. Thought it would be funny to throw a ball near it while it was spinning at ~2400 rpm in our pit during a competition.
Needless to say, the ratchet snapped completely in half and we had to scramble to rebuild the gearbox without a ratchet and pawl before our match that was scheduled in 20 minutes. Most stressful 20 minutes of my life.
I think our biggest screw up was me deciding that the launch system wasn’t good enough for NBN, so I decided to just take it apart. Needless to say, everyone was pretty mad at me. Last time I ever do that…
Putting a 343:1 gear ratio on my scissor lift. Oh and thats not the worste part! I found out it didnt work 5 days before competition. It was last place. It imediatly twisted my axles 5 times in 1/16 inch gap.
The stupidest thing I’ve ever done in vex would have to be getting involved in vex.
In all seriousness, I’d have to say it would actually be not getting involved with my school’s robotics team sooner.
I can definitely second the while loop angst. The personal fail that comes to mind is accidentally plugging in both ends of the orange USB A-A cable into my computer, then getting confused when I couldn’t download anything.
Easily the stupidest thing I’ve ever done is completely rebuilding 2 days before worlds. Glad to see I’m not the only one
Not always a bad thing. One of our school’s teams rebuilt their robot overnight on the final day of UK nationals, went on to win the competition