I’ve done plenty of stupid things, but this time it wasn’t me.
I often grab a handful of axle collars, only to find some of the screws inside are backwards. How one even does that, I don’t know.
On a similar note, HS chain triangles. I don’t make them, but there’s always * that one guy* that thinks its funny to hook together three links. We’ve decided that this year, making a chain triangle is punishable by filing down every single axle.
The stupidest things that I have ever done were:
- Building a U-Drive with NO experience at all because it would be “complex” and “unique”.
- Giving no angle to our flywheel so that we could only shoot low goals.
- Putting side rollers so close together that it could not intake a NBN ball.
- Putting a keps nut on upside down (I put it on really tight and it hurt a lot taking it off).
- Putting a controller in our flywheel to bring it back to the pit station and forgetting to take it out.
Someone at my school did that… 3 times. All of them without permission.
I’m right here…
I relate to you @anon99265204 . A robot is never perfect.
One of our new guys thought that you used shaft collars to keep screws in place, not the keps. It was pretty great. Mine was in my first year in Skyrise, we built a push bot with so much torque it could push the entire stack of cubes in the center of the field. It was quite slow though, we didn’t very many tournaments.
In Nothing But Net we had out auto spin around like 3 times and shoot at us because we forgot to reverse a motor.
Also I was using the flywheel at full speed and i hit the reverse button on accident and we forgot to take that button out of our code and ripped our motors at the US OPEN LOL!!!
I once tried to install and run Autodesk Inventor on a laptop with an Intel Pentium processor and 4 GB RAM. It took 5 hours for the CPU levels to drop from 100% usage!
Alright I can beat all these. Our NBN robot had a ratchet to our flywheel with a gearing of 21:1. Well I was testing something with the ratchet and my finger got too close to the gear… Blood everywhere and that wheel stopped real fast. Still have grooves in my finger but at least I still have it.
We just got a high-powered dremel, and realized we could un-strip our numerous stripped allen wrenches by cutting the tip. Our mentor did the first one. I was working on something, and needed a decent allen wrench, so I took the cut one after it was finished … grabbing it by the hot edge that had just been cut. That was a fun burn.
One of our school previous world team intentionally stripped every screw before going to world so that nobody could mess with it and taking it apart.
Building a robot without designs, then ordering parts that I think I’ll need, end up getting half of what I need, then ordering more, waiting 6 weeks because US to AU shipping and AU Post is horrid. Repeat for 2 seasons till I force myself to be bothered to CAD first
Worst. Desicions. Ever
I would just watch my robot. Did they have fun disassembling it?
I have to add one more, last year I had a my robot with two catapults in the back and it also had a flywheel in the back. I had put the batteries in the front but that didn’t help it all that much, actually when I had them in the back the robot would tip backwards very easily while driving around the field. But after regionals I figured out that for some reason the front two wheels were not touching the ground, ya lol.
In my team’s first year, we thought it would be a good idea to put the robot in the lower storage area of the bus without securing it at all. By the time we arrived to our state competition, pieces of metal were bent all over the place. We ended up scraping the entire thing and building a measly claw-bot six hours before our competition. Because we were rushing so much when we built it, the thing practically fell apart on the field! Needless to say, we got dead last.
My first year, i attempted to use wire cutters to cut steel… rip wire cutters
I once tried using an electric saw designed for wood to cut a steel plate. Pieces went everywhere and disappeared in the trash.
Pretty cynical IMO but hey everyone has their ways.
- Forgetting to plug in the power expander for the flywheel before a semi-finals match and wondering why it wouldn’t spin.
I did the same thing, but our power expander was for the drive base, so we were a sitting duck. The worst part was, we weren’t even 100% aligned with the net, so we just shot all our driver loads only making about half of them. Then, it happened to be a qualification match where our opponents had like 2 balls in the high goal, so we couldn’t even try to score SP. I was so proud of myself. HAHA!
In our rookie year we used the non-locking nuts for our robot so after every match we would have to tighten every single screw. (it got tiring fast) 