Another example of lower power VEX GO / IQ robots being more fault tolerant are the fact that we can make universal Hybrid Gears work at the GO / IQ scale.
Hybrid Gears are a combination spur gear and bevel gear that we first released in the new VEX GO kits. What makes these unique, is that you can mesh any size Hybrid Gear with any other Hybrid Gear in both spur and bevel use cases.
This universality to these bevel gears will likely set off warning bells to anyone who has designed mechanisms at the V5 or FRC scale. In normal usage, bevel gears must be designed as a specific mated pair that is tied to a specific gear ratio. A 24T bevel gear designed for a 1:1 ratio cannot be subbed into a 1:2 ratio bevel gear set. Even if you forced it into the correct position, it’ll quickly grind the gear teeth into dust due to mismatched tooth profiles.
While V5 has some older mated bevel gear pairs, we did not want this level of complexity at the GO / IQ scale.
Thus, at the GO / IQ scale, the low mechanical power that we are looking to transfer means that we do not need a perfect bevel gear tooth profile, allowing us to use a heavily modified profile to enable any Hybrid Gear to mesh with any other Hybrid Gear of the same diametral pitch.
More universally, this is reflected that every time you “graduate” into a higher VEX product line, you’ll need to learn a lot more STEM skills and engineering nuance to design, build, and program successful robots.