I am new to the VEX forums and I appreciate all of the great posts and ideas everyone is putting up here. I am creating this post for all the other newbies out there like me who see all sorts of abbreviations and don’t really know what they mean.
For example I see DR4B and I know it is some kind of lift, and I have seen lots of pictures of various lifts, but I don’t know exactly what it stands for. So hit me with all of your commonly used VEX abbreviations.
Dr6b-double reverse six bar
Dr8b-double reverse eight bar
VCS-Vex coding studio
Nbn-nothing but net
Ss-starstruck
Itz-in the zone
Tt-Tower takeover
Bo1-technically means best of one, I suggest not looking at the debates over bo1 and bo3
Ep-event partner
Tm-tournament manager
Good luck😀
Those drawings are incorrect. The one you have labeled “6 bar” is actually a type of 8 bar linkage, and the one you have labeled “5 bar” is a standard 6 bar.
Edit: Also the “1 bar” is more formally known as a 2 bar.
I know what he has labeled as an “6 bar” is technically an 8 bar linkage but I think that “double 4 bar” is a bit more informative since an “8 bar” is usually referring to his “5-bar” but with another stage. Just like you wouldn’t call a mechanically linked “dr4b” an “8 bar”.
While I realize that these abbreviations and names are ubiquitous in the VEX community, I hope everyone realizes that outside of competitive robotics, these “linkage names” are not common or standard industry (or mechanical engineering) names. Even the most common mechanism, the “4-bar” is actually an entirely different type of mechanism to most any non-vex-knowledgeable-mechanical engineer: Four-bar linkage - Wikipedia
(and we won’t even get started as to who Danny or Goliath are!)
Very true. I have tried to get some of our teams to absorb actual 4 Bar Linkage design for a few different things in the past, but none have really wanted to deal with that.
This summary is confusing to me… strictly speaking, wouldn’t this definition mean that a standard 6 bar should be called a 7 bar? It has 7 nodes/joints
Some people also refer to them by how many parallel bars there are in one direction or another. Or just by orders of complexity. There is not a real rule. These do not come from industry norm or international standard, just common usage among teenagers.
Same goes for drive systems.
X-Drive (four omni wheels on corners at angles)
H-Drive (four omni wheels in standard config, with a fifth perpendicular in the middle)
Also, sometimes a specific drive will be called a Holonomic drive. This does not refer to any particular configuration of wheels, as both of the above as well as Mecanum drives are all Holonomic. Holonomic vs Non-Holonomic is just whether or not it can control all available degrees of freedom. Drive, Strafe, Rotate in place.
Also, Kiwi Drive (three omni wheels in a triangle)
Bling drive: A style of building a 6-wheel chassis where two of the omni-wheels are “locked”, or have screws shoved between the rubber rollers and the plastic wheel frame.
Think you are referring to that point in the middle of the centre, Long c-channel?
That point is not considered a node.
An easier and simpler definition of a node or joint is a point that joins up different linkages and there is movement,
So technically, that point in the centre of the Long c-channel is on the same linkage.
It is definitely confusing. And another thing to note is that the n-bar linkage in VRC is not the same as the conventional n-bar in industry. So this adds on to the confusion.