I am wondering this because right now I’m in 7th grade and doing iq and I’m afraid that in highschool that the robotics coach puts the freshmen on cortex and I’m wondering if we could be competitive
1 Like
You’re gonna be at a huge disadvantage. But, you also have teams like this:
Most teams, or the competitive ones at least, had v5 when this robot was made. But this robot, clearly, was able to compete head on with a lot of v5 robots. Note, this is turning point and might not apply to next year.
This year in particular, v4 would put you at an extreme disadvantage because of how high the loads were. Hopefully next year won’t be like that so v4 isn’t completely obsolete.
5 Likes
Be competitive? Probably not come time for Worlds, just because of the shear power of V5. Qualify for state? I’d say it’s very much feasible with proper driving and a great build quality; at our first competition, a team of full-cortex made it to the finals and actually almost won, and some regions it doesn’t take that high of a skills score to qualify for the event.
5 Likes
to me its not worth it
240P was an amazing robot, but it would have been crushed by most v5 robots. There is a reason they switched to v5 for worlds, defense with a 4M v5 chassis would have easily stalled the 8M drive on 240P. 393 was obsolete the second the first v5 kit was shipped.
13 Likes
I agree with you, but also not every competition will have world quality v5 robots. I think it’s fair to say if you brought the 240P robot to a local competition, it would do well. I say this because my organization was relatively late at getting v5 kits and we still did well at our local competitions with v4. Mind you, this is a 7th grader asking if he/she will be able to compete with v4. I guess it all depends on how a person uses the cards they are dealt.
Here’s another example of a v4 robot doing well against v5 robots:
(pay attention to 109a)
4 Likes
Ah I see, I was thinking about it on a worlds level because I assume you would want to judge viability of a design to the best competition (of course if your goal is to preform as well as possible/win worlds).
At least that’s how I interpreted “competitive” in the title.
3 Likes
if you can get v5 its highly recommended also since vex is probably not going to support it — like customer support, availability — as well as v5. V5 is much more user friendly, going from iq to v5 the workflow is very similar while going from iq to cortex it’s super funky. basically for a new team, you are going to improve so much faster with v5 and if the club doesn’t have the funding you could probably get a grant for it. 7701 has this thing called ZEF — zionsville educational foundation — and they helped us go to worlds last year for free. it’s not impossible that you have something similar, so i’d look into that if u get stuck with cortex
v5 is better than cortex in every way. If you can, use v5. It will give you an advantage. That said, cortex can still preform well, but it takes a lot of hard work. Also the game makes a big difference. It was easier to make good cortex bots in turning point because your cycle time was less dependent on the actual power output of your robot, more on the efficiency of some lower power subsystems, like intakes. You’ll always be bad on the drive, but the actual shooters on some of those cortex bots would easily best most v5 shooters. But then you look at tower takeover, and cortex robots just sucked. You simply didn’t have enough power to compete. So imo, you can still be mildly successful with cortex if the game is right, and you possess the engineering skills, but really your talking about an enormous disadvantage against teams with v5.
3 Likes
Our teams are on limited funds so we plan to use cortex as long as we can. Cortex can work. I think we were the only team at states (Michigan) on cortex. Going into states, we were 3rd in the states in skills, and coming out we were 5th. Usually we competed mid to upper 3rd in the qualifiers we went to, unless we had something break and completely fell flat. It can be done, but parts are getting harder to find and work with, so investing more money in cortex simply isn’t worth it.
I will say you need to think out of the box and find a niche that the rest of the bots can’t do. This year we spent more time on towers, and had a 4 motor dr4b to get all the way to the top tower. Having this was a compliment to the traybots that seemed to dominate the competitions and allowed us to go farther than we would have otherwise. in practice runs they had a 48 point programming skills, but when at competitions, field conditions would throw something off early and they simply couldn’t recover.
The girls also had extra documentation and discussions for judges concerning their limited abilities with cortex and how they tried to exploit any niche they could.
4 Likes
I think with the right build cortex could be competitive. My team won the excellance award with our low quality cortex bot. We were the only cortex system at our state comptition. Overall I saw cortex being very competitive all season.
2 Likes
I was simply talking about the game, but that also brings up a great point: judged awards don’t care if you have Cortex or V5. Although you probably aren’t going to win against the best V5 bots, if you have the best documentation and engineering process, a Cortex team can still win Design, or Excellence if one’s dealt a great hand of matchups. The Design rubric doesn’t specifically say you need to be a “viable team that can win the game”.
6 Likes
Of course, this all assumes that the Cortex system will still be legal for competition in 2020-2021.
I posted in one of the many threads about this that there are about 25% of the teams that didn’t have the dollars to flip to V5, and with the recent state budget disaster, unlikely they will get money for this year. So Cortex robots, will be a thing in 2020-21.
2 Likes