Disaster ensued. On the day of impounding we decided to do last minute tests to the chomper. We realized that if for some reason we collected more than four balls the chomping mechanism would get jammed and bad things would happen to the lego structure. To fix this we added a sensor to detect when a ball was chomped so that we could turn off the chomping mechanism if four balls were collected. At the very last minute we decided to add a thread that would run in the background that would play a little music every time a ball was chomped. We thought that would be cute and the audience would appreciate it. However what we did not consider is the maximum number of threads that the Handy Board can handle. We ended up exceeding that limit with the addition of the music. Unfortunately we did not have time to test our program before impound and we ended up submitting the robot with untested code.
In the competition things were going great. The chomper turned to the opponents side and went right for the first ball. After chomping the first ball successfully the chomper turned left 90 degrees and then sat motionless. A new thread was created to make the chomper back into the wall to align itself, but unfortunately the added music thread prevented the backup thread from executing. Instead the chomper sat there waiting for its back keyboard switches to hit the back wall signifying to the program that the chomper was aligned with the wall. In that one moment all our work sat there, spinning its chomping mechanism and laughing at us for not testing the final code.