Hey community,
When I originially purchased the V5 system, I thought I would have room for the 12x12 fields area. However, this has not worked out as planned. I’m looking for ideas for smaller field/challenge area sizes or other configurations that would accomodate the standard size clawbot (or similar or smaller) yet give students room to manuever and complete various challenges?
What are your ideas or what have you done for this type of situation?
VEX used to sell an 8x8 field perimeter for classrooms - you can do this with the 12’x12’ use 2 4’ section per wall.
You can make your own perimeter out of 1"x12"x8’ planks cut to your desired size.
You can make up your own challenges. Use PVC and other obstacles…
To vex staff: it would be handy to have a cut-down (well, folded or rolled out of the way) option for the GPS strips so code using it can be developed in more environments. Vex might even sell more GPS kits if it was known that the engineers could take the kit home to a smaller space and work on it. Logically it would be possible to plant a robot in the centre of the field, spin round once or twice to infer which regions of the strips are visible and save those parameters. Obviously a development burden, so it would be fighting with other priorities. Of course a corner of the field can be reproduced anywhere, but we rely on dead reckoning while facing the wrong way.
@WillJM here’s the smallest robot I’ve made so far, motivated by supporting holonomic driving practice anywhere.
Well, depends what type of field perimeter you have, but each side length of the field uses 3 segments. You can use 2 per side and create an 8x8’ field, cutting out the middle section when assembling the perimeters (your GPS strips won’t work though).
Cut out these sections:
By the way, I tried to look for the non-portable field perimeter, but can’t seem to find it…
Another idea in combination with custom PVC field elements @WillJM , reach out to VRC (V5RC 
) teams in your area and see if they’re willing to give you some previous years’ game elements. Most organizations that I know of have piles of older elements and would absolutely love for you to take them off their hands for free. This past year’s triballs are pretty simple to manipulate, if a bit bulky. If it’s an older organization then the cones from In the Zone (2017-18) are another fantastic option, or if they’ve really been around for a while then the foam balls from Nothing But Net (2015-16) are about as easy as it gets to manipulate and shoot.
Our program has worked out of a classroom for many years. We leave the field set up and the parts, robots, & tables are stored on carts. We meet after school so we roll our gear into the hallway which frees up the classroom space for practice. At the end of practice everything is carted up and rolled back into the room for safe keeping.
You may not have the same availability but this was our solution.
These are all great ideas. I like the idea of using a modified field size with the tiles. Teams that don’t have the field tiles can easily purchase these and make their own borders with 2x6 0r 2x8 or 2x10 lumber. As mentioned by sazrocks, it would be nice to get my hands on some of the older game elements not in use by teams.
Thanks!
If you were in Massachusetts we have tons of over under and spin up gear.
Another challenge is to use 2" PVC platform 2’x2’ platform topped with 1/8" - 1/4" plywood - a good challenge to develop robots to climb up onto platforms or over 2" PVC barriers…
If you have sensors, like the optical sensor - create targets for robots to detect - good coding practice.
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