I will address a possible scenario for this in a post during the weekend… I really like the premise for using 3D printed parts and keeping aligned with RECF mission. Workflow should be straight forward, and events partners should be able choose to accept 3D printed parts at their events or not during pilot year and teams should be able to make an informed consent to use 3D pieces in robot knowing design will be part of event database and public post season (an option), or choose to keep their works secret forever and not be able to use 3D parts. Trade offs.
I like the discussions - but will have something more in-depth this week - you know school over, and I have to clean up mess in five rooms this week … yeah procrastination not a great trait!
To be clear - GDC defines game rules for this season and beyond - and a lot of discussions happen from teams, coaches, event partners, educators, … , with these changes to game rules occur - most notably by final release of Game Manual, and recently due to pandemic … Polls are just one input into any discussions. EPs will have a significant voice in July EP summit. Pilots do exist and do inform future competition seasons. So one opinion should not be single factor, nor should single polls in any forums … It is a good discussion to have.
Threaded inserts are by no means a requirement. Look into countersinking nylocks. Not tryna be negative here, just one less thing to worry about fighting for.
I’m not entirely sure that it should be mandatory to post them as soon as you make them, or before your tournament. I’m kinda leaning towards teams having to post them at the end of the season- that way, teams could still learn from the designs from past seasons, and many of them won’t work with designs from this season, so they won’t be plug and play. They won’t be able to look at past seasons the first one it’s in effect, of course, but it would probably be worth it. It may be part of like the rollout of v5- gave a huge advantage to teams that got it first, but was worth it at the end.
The other option, however, is not to make it mandatory midseason, but for it to count towards the design and excellence award, and maybe for it to be it’s own judged award.
Or you could do both.
You could also just leave a hexagonal hole in your print and put a standoff in there.
The intent is for the 10-15% of you that have 3D printing skills to jumpstart the rest of the teams. I want a huge pool of sample parts and designs out there for other teams to be inspired by and have the chance to modify them (and republish the updated design).
By releasing them at events (or hey, you can design, and post them here if you have something cool before an event) there is a stream of parts out there.
If you have an idea on how to get VEX specific and possibly useful 3D components out to thousands of teams so they can use it THIS season please post it.
… and this is why we can’t have nice things. I’ve been trying to get 3D printing in the rules since 2015. @anon4126930 has been trying too for at least 4 years. But it’s things like this, trying ways to circumvent rules isn’t helpful. Likewise someone said well who is going to check to see if the part we posted is actually the part we used. I want to be able to trust teams like happens with the plastic sheets. If teams would spend 1/2 the time on ways to make this work vs just complaining about it we would be much farther along.
Again goals are to get 3D printing accessable to ALL VRC teams. This is a combination of low cost printers (this is in progress) and getting 3D printing design skills specifically around VEX compatible parts to all the teams. (Specifically VEX parts since teaching 10,000 teams how to print Yoda isn’t helpful)
It seems to me that the competitive teams want their designs private and everyone less serious about the competition and more focused on learning would want designs public. To me this looks like a major conflict of interest considering the competitive teams will be more likely to take advantage of 3D printing. I’d even go a step farther to predict that competitively minded teams will be the majority of teams involved with 3D printing. Because of this, no matter how you structure the file sharing rule, I don’t see any cheat-safe method of forcing competitive teams to share their intellectual property. The only way I see 3D printing working in VRC is without mandatory file sharing.
And this had been one of the showstoppers in the past. Its giving the competitive, cash rich teams another advantage over the other teams. VRC is based around keeping parity (every one is limited to the same catalog of parts). How do you suggest fixing this?
Competitive and Cash Rich are completely different things in the vex world, thank god.
And that’s a huge distinction!
Even among competitive teams, many organizations are competitive for many different reasons.
Some are the Cash Rich hyper win focused copy paste internet bots that everybody hates, but there are also competitive teams who get ahead with genuine innovation.
So how do you stop competitive teams from doing the things that make them competitive (like innovating custom parts), umm I don’t know? You don’t.
No it’s not. Parity of cost, not of innovation. All teams aren’t meant to get handed everyone else’s ideas on a platter, everyone’s just meant to start from the same place. I understand the educational value of releasing files but that takes away any competitive advantage earned with your innovations and motivation to compete along with it.
Would introducing 3D printing without a cad file release clause help mostly high level teams? Initially, yes. And I don’t see another way of going about it without completely forgetting that competitors deserve dividends for their innovation. Over time tho, just seeing custom parts in reveal videos etc. will trickle down, and everyone can eventually benefit. I think long term, the sooner we introduce printing, the faster we can overcome that initial disadvantage slung onto less competitive teams.
I absolutely hate this idea. The majority of learning how to manufacture with a 3D printer comes from CADing the items in a certain way. Learning to have certain parts thicker for strength and thinner to save weight. When you do this you will completely skip out on the majority of the lessons for newer people, and give motivated teams a reason to not 3D print out of the fear that they’ll do the work for the competitors.
By this logic we should share all of our code for the sake of helping newer teams. I’m all for making 3D printing tutorials to help newer teams, but forcing teams to give their work that they researched, designed, and tested to a team that puts in a tenth of the effort is honestly an awful idea. Would love to see 3D printing in VRC, but not like that.
Then again, who says that you have to do a write up of the part? or give it a specific title? You could just call it 12345a part b, and it can be hard to tell what it actually is, especially if it’s something more mundane like a brace mount or a gusset. And many settings that will influence the structure and rigidity of it come from the print settings, not always the cad.
The end of the season just means that 99% will never post it. I’m not even saying the people have bad intentions, they just get busy and stuff gets lost over time. There is no enforcement mechanism.
The GDC always says that they will let us 3D print when we can have a level playing field.
You can get a 3D printer for about the cost of their latest GPS unit, so they can no longer claim that cost is the issue.
There is a knowledge gap as well. If a team can get the file for a cool design they saw at the last competition then they will be more likely to try it out… Then they will be more likely to try to make their own piece next.
100% of forum users want 3D printing to happen. 99.9% of actual VEX competitors would like to know how you made that part and having a file will at least get them started.
It’s entirely possible that enough teams will share their files that the requirement becomes moot because there’s just so much stuff out there. Maybe you could just leave it as an online challenge, but do it as a monthly online challenge with a ticket to WORLDS. You would see a LOT of activity then.
We are all just hypothising… But… As @Foster said before, you do not have the piece that will win worlds. Making you share will probably have a good effect on the community and will probably not put you at a disadvantage (unless you 3D print your whole bot???).
Why would that even be considered I’ll intent? It would be my own intellectual property. There is no reason too force someone to share their work. At this point, as I said previously, why not force each team to share their code before each comp. force them to share notebook and cad files of their bot.
We need to remember that this is a competition. The rookie teams have no business having 3D printed parts that have been meticulously designed, tested, and iterated by someone else with more experience. The robots should represent the skill of the team. When you do this you are taking away the competitive aspect, the part that fuels the excitement and passion behind the community. If we take away the ability for one team to innovate in a unique way, and use that to hold an edge over the competition, it becomes less of a competition. As @ThirdDegree stated rookie teams will see the cool things that the experienced teams have, and they will attempt to do something similar, but on their own. And you know what they might fail, but that’s part of the journey to victory, and the best way to learn.
Feed a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. In this scenario, we’d be giving away fish, and that’s not what vex is about.
sounds about right if you were a boomer walking uphill both ways to school:)
What is being asked is to provide your 3D part - not integration to success …Depending on implementation, it would be to a clearing house available to EPs and their inspector team and at end of season part of public repository for all VEX community to employ in their game designs.
What about the forums then? jpearmans end of season code request? 333a’s dr4b tutorial? The pilons odometry documents? Those give information that wouldn’t have been learned by trial and error. Should those be allowed by that logic?
My thought for that is that the cad files shouldn’t be available to download, but there could be a 3d viewing place similar to what exists on the vex website for the cad files. Then teams couldn’t plug and play it. If the cad files were available, then there should be a detailed write up that is mandatory. Then teams could read it, to learn about the choices made.
You don’t. I have leftover 2020 money burning a hole in my coffers. I can either grant it out to teams or I can hire an intern at so many $$ a part to download it, upload it with comments, tags, etc.
But again (we can all play the again game) the intent is to help teams. If you want to dance around the rules, go for it. And again, it’s easy to say no (ask RECF) just like many of you are doing. We are open to helpful suggestions to sell this.
Uhh. I honestly don’t even know how to respond to this. This a bad thing? Vex is supposed to be a mental workout. If it’s easy you’re doing it wrong.
Aight, great. You want to share your pieces with the community, good on you. I don’t necessarily agree, but that’s your design that you designed and iterated. I don’t understand why you think you can force me to share something that I made myself.
Secondly, that is entirely subjective to the piece. For example this season I 3D printed wheel modules for an X-Drive. This would take out a significant challenge of designing one for a rookie team, a challenge that would lead to a great amount of experience for the newcomers. This piece would be far more useful than a simple bracket or coupler.
As for giving rookie teams support, that’s what we are here for as a forum. So we can walk people through the info, so there is an explanation and lesson accompanying it.
None of this was forced. This was all voluntary from the team. No where even near the same scenario. Go ahead, share what you want, but don’t you you force me to.
This is more viable, I don’t mind this as much, but the idea of forcing a team to post on that is still not good.
We all know of thingy verse. I just want to ask. How many people have learned to cad using that? This would essentially be the same thing for vex but worse in the sense that you are forced to share on it.
