My team is looking to anodize our aluminum over the summer for next years game. Does anyone in the forum know what price I would be looking at if I wanted all of my metal to be anodized? Also, if anyone has any tips of how I could convince an anodizing company to sponsor my team that would also be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
1264E dunwoody, GA
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I would be careful, due to the new V5 system, any color that would interfere with the optical sensor would be prohibited.
That could be any color since you could code the sensor to sense any color. If the color isn’t all red or blue you should be fine with anodized metal.
As long as it isn’t the close to the same color as a field object, you should be fine.
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You can program the red and green and blue and green as a single colors for the flags, in the current game. Also, you can recognize black poles and yellow for the platform. Interesting programming for future games.
At some point G2 is bound to apply here. You can argue all day that a robot being a certain color is interfering with your vision sensor, but you should design your robot to not detect other robots as things like caps. If your robot intentionally looks like a cap, which would be dumb, considering you could just grab a cap and use it to distract a vision sensor, then its understandable. Otherwise, I think this rule is poorly designed.
Megamind right here
20 characters qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm
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+1 
This one
How?2019-03-28T07:00:00Z
Like this
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Anyway, I’ve seen both red and blue anodized metal, and nobody has complained in my experience. However, vision sensors were kind of rare, and they’ve been pointing upwards, at the flags, and away from robots. I can see in future games where it might cause a problem with floor elements, but robots have to not detect things like the starting tiles as Game objects anyway.
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Vex at one time sold the VEXplorer kits, all the metal was black. Very awesome looking. So that color is street legal.
Most anodizing companies charge a set up fee, usually from $70-$100 then they charge by the piece depending on how many pieces will fit in their tank and how many they can hang from their racks. If you have a large number, the price goes down as they simply load new pieces in the tank and turn on the electricity. Colors are more than clear finish but only a few cents each piece. There is the standard finish and special shiny or masked finishes and how perfect do you need it so special finishes cost more. Figure anywhere from a few cents per piece to say a dollar if they are large pieces and again do they have to change the fluids in the tank once you have a huge number of items done. Generally, the more items in the tank, less cost per piece. If you could find a company that is doing a run for another person in a color you want, they might just charge by the piece and that would not be much .
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