I’ve been thinking about this, and with the recent announcement about the “static free (even though there has never been a static issue) omni wheels” and the ending of the regular 4" wheel, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is pretty much unworkable. Teams have enough of the 4" wheels to outfit most robots. With the advent of the “locked omni” teams now have locked omnis for most robots.
To have to toss these away in two years just because a new wheel is madness. It’s expensive to just toss a $30 thing away “just because”.
The change out of electronics is fine, I don’t miss the flashlight, I’ve had teams try to do things with the speaker. I don’t understand why wheels or metal would be an issue. While I feel for @DRow and keeping a website up to date, keeping a discontinued page shouldn’t be that hard.
I agree with a prior post that the loss of the engineering data about old components off the site. Will the same fate happen to the KB articles?
While I applaud the new additions to the product line, not a big fan of this new idea. It’'s adding cost to established teams, rendering some prior purchases as junk.
Oh yeah, to be clear, I’m in complete agreement. In an ideal world anything that was ever VEX legal (barring obvious things like electronics) should continue to be legal. It makes the program less affordable, and puts more things in landfills, to force teams to throw out perfectly good wheels/gears/etc.
I was more saying that, if they feel the need to do this, they should at least give teams any kind of guarantee that their parts won’t become immediately illegal, and also that parts won’t suddenly become illegal mid-season.
I am pretty sure it is the same for many other teams as well - every now and then, some of my students will be rummaging through the heap of old and discarded junkyard of parts, trying to find some obscure and old parts that were no longer in productions years ago.
And you will see the glint in their eyes whenever they found something that they can adapt and use for their current robots.
now I feel good for not using them even thought there are quite good for clamps. Using pneumatics, linear motion, to push the steel slides(its steel is not going to break really), linear motion, makes an incredibly strong lock.
Right, and In Soviet Russia, after the end of an unsuccessful season, robots disassemble you.
Are you trying to imply that there is a conflict of interest between vex being exclusive supplier of most of the vrc legal parts and changes in the game rules having outsized influence on the sales?
Free markets theory says that if consumers don’t like being taken for granted, there is this point of time when they feel they had enough, and the demand could collapse overnight, isn’t capitalism fun?
@Sylvie, will you, please, stop worrying about missing common sense and accept a conspiracy theory about vex making inconsistent game rules on purpose, to have everyone abandon VRC and switch to VIQ, where shipping costs are less and margins are bigger?