Hey! I’m starting VEX V5 in August, and I’ve done VEX IQ for a couple years. I do know a bit about V5, but my knowledge is not quite the best. I’m super excited but also kinda nervous, so I’d love any tips or advice, building, programming, sensors, motors, competitions, or just general stuff for someone new to V5. Thank you!
Three most important things for everything:
- Never stop researching. Whether it’s watching robot interviews, scrolling through APIs, watching matchplays, or re-reading the Guide to Judging, never stop researching your areas. There’s always ways to do your job better.
- Always keep it simple. Why build and chain and tune and position some complicated S bot when a literal lever stuck to a motor works just as well? Aura isn’t found in some complicated robot, it’s found in winning and reliability.
- Manage your time well. Don’t be like our building-heavy team. Your coder needs time for autonomouses, and your driver needs practice. Plan out everything beforehand (especially using CAD, makes things a lot easier).
For my organization I was putting together a guide with all the things I’ve learned over the years. I won’t finish it until probably mid-April, but I’ll try and remember to post it here. It has a lot of general and niche tips for most of what you’ll need.
Starting out though, scrolling through the Purdue Sigbots Wiki, some FUN RECF videos, and VCAD robots will give you some good starting information.
One grave error I made when I first started with V5 was trying to do too much, too soon. I am an ambitious person, and when I came into v5, I tried to act on those ambitions, however I did not have the skills and lessons required to act upon these designs I envisioned. Start with simple and efficient designs, and only delve into complexity once you have an excellent foundation to support it.
Here’s a few:
- if your robot already works really well, DON’T REBUILD A COMPLEX MECHANISM RIGHT BEFORE STATES (this is targeted at my former teammate).
- If you use keps nuts, replace them with lock nuts before you finalize the mechanism.
- Make your robot easy to add to. Don’t build a drivetrain that takes up the whole space limit, or you won’t have space to add an intake later.
- Speed isn’t everything, you need torque too.
- Don’t build a mechanism that you don’t understand. If you don’t know how it works, you can’t fix it when it breaks.
- Things going wrong isn’t an if, it’s a when. If you see something that might break, it’s going to. Maybe not now, but sometime soon. Either prevent it or come up with a quick fix to use when it does break
I hope this is helpful, good luck in V5!
A HUGE mistake I made during the transition was building hero bots, they are horrible in v5.
Welcome to Vex V5! I would highly recommend checking out FUN Robotics Network as they give very good insight into top teams around the country. Another thing that you need to make sure that you don’t start out with building a robot that is too complicated for you. Hero Bots are a great start, but don’t hold up well in matches (get outplayed easily). You should also watch high level matches from signature events, as they are the easiet ways to watch top teams in action.
I don’t think he should start with hero bot. I started with it and did not do well and didn’t learn anything. He should try to make his own simple design for the game and improve and rebuild so he can learn.
One big thing is to MAKE SURE you have a good, experienced coach who can show you around V5, this will be really helpful because otherwise it will be very hard to learn how to build, specific techniques, etc.