I am starting a V5 team, and we are looking for ways to save on money. Do you think that the field perimeter is a must to practice? Or could we just use the field tiles? Maybe we could make our own perimeter but does anyone have any experience with that and how it will affect your practice and autons when you go to competitions
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The field perimeter is heavily advocated, as it can help with many things such as practicing for the competition, but is not a requirement. The field tiles will work, but I recommend to use one.
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If you plan on creating one, you could just use anything that has the same dimensions as a field perimeter. Here are the dimensions, if you want to do this:
- 11.5 inches in height
- 1.25 inches in length (the short one)
- ~47.6 inches in width
- If you play without one, autonomous will be hard, because you will have to avoid walls the entire time. During practice sessions, the human brain will likely creating a negative reaction when touching the sides, and you might often avoid the field perimeter during matches.
I hope this helps, and good luck on your new Robotics team!
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Over a decade since our club’s novice year - we fabricated Toss Up goals using cement forms. no foam tiles, concrete slab as shop floor. Middle school, journey was epically chaotic, but they manage to snag excellence award and made it to Worlds - bottom of the barrel performance, they decided to do two robot rebuilds, one at Worlds… and their robot battery caught fire/smoldered epically when they sheared their battery cable in lift mechanism… at the time in Anaheim, CA, it was “VEXDome” for MS divisions 
As Grant Cox reminds me, “don’t over think it!”… The journey in itself is the reward…
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Field tiles are definitely plenty. Having game objects, at least the rings, is really the most important part though. The field walls are remarkably unimportant imo for coding auton unless you’re using a wall to line up a right angle but you could improvise something to be a small bit of field wall should you get to that point. The money would be much better spent on a spare controller and/or brain or more advanced gears/sensors/wheels (guessets too honestly if you want to make an X-Drive for this game which could be pretty competitive).
If you use the v5 distance sensor be mindful that it uses infrared light so different colors and lighting environments will affect its accuracy, so different field perimeters or substitute materials may imply accuracy/inaccuracy that does not exist. In general though, I have not had issues with this at competition unless I am trying to measure the black parts of the mobile perimeter wall at distances greater than about 8 inches (where the FOV narrows).
TL;DR: the perimeter is not too important, just get tiles and some rings. Save your money for robot parts.
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