Just wondering how the international teams feel about vex parts being in imperial and not metric. Is it frustrating?
Extremely…
But… we have gotten used to it.
The real issue is not able to get the exact size tools…
All the tools sold here are in metric, and it will always be a tiny bit off the imperial measurements.
Thought the rest of the world are all using SI units?
Honestly anything design wise uses imperial anyways - you get used to it IMO. It’s a little hard at first, but you become adept enough switching between the two.
One of those hard lessons of history:
Ever been to Europe?
Even the whole electronics industry switched mostly to metric sized components - early ICs had 0.1" pin spacing, but pretty much anything SMD is metric now. Even though a chip resistor is still called 1206, the dimensions are long quoted as 3.2mm x 1.6mm
What do architects use? Mostly imperial. What do carpenters use? Imperial. What are the floorplans of your house drawn with? imperial. How do they measure screen size? imperial. How large are the tiles in all of our kitchens and schools? 1’x1’. Why do all rulers come with both an imperial and metric side?
We use holes as a unit. As Americans we have grown up with the imperial system, but it is still idiotic and most of the time don’t need to know each hole is 1/2 and inch. Robot must fit in 36 hole cube, 2 hole ground clearance to get over bump, and count lengths of things to cut and compare in holes. With the notches every 5 holes counting is fast. Most of the time we just assume the size limit is slightly more than a full length c channel.
Actually… the rest of the world uses metric for our floor plans, etc.
Yeah…
Oh…didn’t know that. Maybe Canada’s a little too close to the states.
Hehe, do I really need to answer all that one by one? Tiles may be 20x20cm, 30x30, 20x25, all of that easy to express in inches if needed, but a popular size is 33cm. Yep, 1/3 of a meter (metre for you?). You’ll have really hard times getting imperial ruler (no pun intended) in Europe and all the body shops cringe if you bring in an older American cars, since none of their wrenches will fit, not even mentioning replacement bolts. If you stop by home improvement shop and ask for 2x4, they’ll be like "what? and if you bring them a plan to cut you few pieces of MDF for a cabinet, they’ll make sure you’ve got the lengths in cm and not mm. Computer monitors are still sold by an inch, but TVs are advertized as 80cm, 120cm.
Our graph paper has 5mm sqares, though a piece of paper is 210x297mm, since it is 1/16 of a square meter.
ohmy. Here we just have both. you can buy wood in cm or In. just gotta specify. Measurements are made commonly in both inches and cm, for some reason. We sell toolboxes with two sets of wrenches (imperial and metric), but we have wonderful square screwdriver heads.
Canada produces wood products for the US building trades. The US market is larger than the Canadian domestic market, so they (Canadian producers) label many items with nominal imperial sizes.
However, this is changing. Nearly all actual (rather than nominal) thickness dimensions for sheet goods and engineered building materials (trusses, beams, sidings and claddings, roof materials, flooring, etc) are metric. Length dimensions for stick lumber (wood through and through as opposed to engineered materials) are changing more slowly, but they are changing. It will all be metric eventually.
This is true in the US as well.