We just received our $50 goal-and-object kit today. Wow, those balls and barrels are BIG. They didn’t seem so large at the HP Field House at Disney World.
(Did I mention BIG?)
Thats what I thought when first reading through the manual. I pulled an ice cream container out of the cupboard to really get a feel for what 6" diameter was like. Its going to be interesting to see how many objects a robot can hold this year, and if the hoarding strategy is effective (with the size of the objects). And how about that 30" goal?
I was thinking the same thing. When I went back to the hotel and looked at the manual, I thought that what I held couldn’t have been 6 inches in diameter.
That is pretty large… Can’t wait!
are they plastic like the round up pieces or foam like clean sweep?
they are plastic like round up
Are the pieces slick? Or have some texture like the tubes from round up?
How much do they weigh?
I heard someone say that the barrels are closer to 0.5 pounds and the balls are 0.26 pounds, so pretty heavy
that is correct
The balls have a surface just like the tubes – it’s rough, but the barrels are glassy smooth on the outside, although the indentations on the ends are rough.
I can’t weigh them right now, as our scale is still in a crate that came back from World Championship. It hasn’t been unpacked yet.
Field Specs say
“Each Barrel weighs approximately
0.53 lbs. and each Ball weighs
approximately 0.24 lbs.”
Which is a bit heavier than the tubes from Round Up
“Each Ring Weighs Approximately .225lbs.”
That’s heavy, especially for the barrels. That’s a lot of weight for the robot. If you get 4 of them, that’s an extra two pounds!
Are you referring to the small almost finger sized holes on each end of the barrels? Or just the whole concave shape at the ends of each barrel?
If you compare the weight of the footballs in Clean Sweep, it doesn’t seem too horrible. Those footballs were not exactly light–I would estimate their weight as 0.5 pound or more (each). I was trying to open the VEX wiki Clean Sweep manual to find exact weight measurements but the pdf file seems corrupted. Some online searching suggests that a 7 inch diameter spherical foam ball toy is around 8 ounces or 0.5 pound
10Q (my team that year) was able to pickup and dump 6 footballs and assorted green balls in a simple pivoting, L-shaped basket geared I believe 5 to 1 with four 3-wire motors.
I still haven’t actually seen the game pieces myself, but looking at the measurements and other people’s comments, I feel like weight will be less of an issue than object size and the surface texture. Good continuous feed systems will have to deal with these two factors quite well.
I totally agree that the surface texture and the size are WAY bigger factors than weight! This is the real challenge this year.
I found this object in the box that contained the balls and barrels and it took me a couple of days to figure out what it was for:
https://vexforum.com/gallery/files/2/0/9/1/2011-05-02_umbrella_stand_smaller.jpg
At least it will be usefull 1 year from now.
haha, tru dat
we are wondering what we can do with our tubes, ladder, and bases from this year…
We received ours today, I hadn’t realized that the barrel would fit in the goal sideways.