When Robots Attack

From FIRSTwiki

Note: This article is seriously tounge-in-cheek, for the humor challenged out there.

Gather round children, and old man Phrontist will tell you a story.

Ah, the exubrance of a rookie team that just got their drivetrain working. The only issue was, it handled like a parkinsonian patient with a serious amphetamine abuse problem. So off we went, cooking up new schemes to make our driving more smooth. I had just banged out some new code with *Name Deleted To Protect The Innocent* (now an alumnus) when he went off to test it. The cord was inserted, the code uploaded. But something was horribly wrong...

You see code automatically begins executing when uploaded to the RC and *name omitted* (or more likely) myself had made an error that caused one motor to drive full regardless of input, and the other to stand still. Well, *name omitted* was holding the laptop, the laptop was essentially tied to the robot via a serial cable, and this wily program started running. Let's Watch (and don't forget to turn on repeat)!

When Robots Attack! (~2.5MB avi)

From that day forth we had a dead man's switch, which, unless depressed would not allow the robot to move.

So remember kids! When you program a computer, the worst thing that can happened is hardware damage, in the very worst case. But when you program a robot, it's not hard to make yourself look like a complete idiot, or seriously injure yourself.

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