Pneumatics for future years

Do we expect pneumatics to be allowed without a motor penalty next year (like this year)?

I will bet that next years game will not benefit from having pneumatic systems.

They will allow the new 5 watt motors on a two 5 watt for one 11 watt motors exchange, up to 10 total motors on the robot (6 11w, 4 5w)

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]are the 5 watt motors weaker? also why would pneumatics not be beneficial? if you think about it you could still use you 10 motors + pneumatics for small systems or motor sharing systems so you can get more functionality also do you have a link to the post or place were they said that you can substitute motors? or is it in a game manual? thanks!

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Whatever the case I highly doubt they will make pnuematics useless since everyone has already bought them (or tried) for this year’s game.

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With the exception of the robot expansion rule, which changes along with the game, most of the other general rules in the game manual change very slowly and are quite consistent. The “motor penalty” only became really significant with the introduction of V5, and the need to run it alongside the cortex system. Losing two motors out of 12 to use pneumatic cylinders was not really considered a penalty so much as losing two motors out of eight for the pneumatic cylinder addition. I don’t expect any changes to pneumatics in the next game manual, but I do hope for some method to have additional motors when the low powered motors come out. I am no fan of design convergence, or pre-designed robots that everybody copies, so if there is more options for clever and unique mechanisms, I’m all for that!

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Lots to unpack here:

Based on that one motor is 11 watts of power and the other is 5 watts, it’s a safe assumption they are less power

They are beneficial, but the OP asked about the game. This year with trying to grapple onto mogos, the use of pneumatic is a great thing. In a distance shooting game, not so much.

Yes

You want to see pages 22-23 section R6 of the 2022-2023 game manual. It’s outlined there pretty well.

So the first rule of sales is not sell something that everyone has. For example, nobody had pneumatic systems, they sold thousands, profit.

Having them be super useful next year does not help sales. Now a shooting game that could use a high speed wheel shooter would benefit from the new 800 RPM black motor cart to make it easy to spin up wheels. Couple that with the new 10" traction master (2 for $65) wheels to use as a flywheel base make it an instant hit for the 2022-23 game. It will be the meta-bot by October.

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waiiittt

Confused what? Do you have inside info or something(you would) ?

Do we have to buy the new motors? What

people will always find a use for pneumatic if they can use them without penalty. But this game in particular made pneumatics near-essential. I actually think that if the 2 motor penalty had remained, people would still opt to use pneumatics. Next year’s game might not be as useful. Think of change up, pneumatics really wouldn’t have been important, even if they hadn’t been penalized. The only thing off the top of my head I can think of is actuating intakes to spread or close them, but people managed to do that with ratchets anyways.

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The 5 watt motors are part of the EXP line that was announced last fall and will ( ship in 6 weeks ) VEX EXP System Bundle - VEX Robotics

In other threads there have been posts that these motors are V5 compatible. I would guess that there is a huge backlog of orders that will need to get filled before the motors will be able to be purchased as single items.

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Either Foster is trolling you, or you didn’t get the link to the “beta” version of the new game manual that people who have been around for years get a preview of.

In case you missed it in your emails, here’s the link to the “beta” of the new game manual: BETA 22-23 VRC game manual (but be sure to check quick, because we’re not supposed to be sharing the link with just anyone, and REC might delete my post if they find out).

If you want the 5.5 Watt motors, you would have to buy them. VEX isn’t going to send them to you for free, are they???

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Thanks for the many replies… We couldn’t get our hands on pneumatics this season due to budget restrictions, however now we have much more budget we were thinking of getting pneumatics now for next season…
But we’ll probably wait till the game is revealed to see whether they’ll actually be useful…
Thank you

That, is the best practice for engineering design, wait for problem/need definition, then work forward from there.

In the meantime, good to determine the team goals for new season.

@Foster - isn’t the new game going to include communication latency - so instant on/off devices going to be a problem? I’m thinking sensors will be huge advantage.

(yes I think Foster is trolling - and rightfully so :slight_smile: )

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My teacher and coach @physics_smith has a theory on this that I think could totally be a possibility. He thinks that next year there will be a ten motor limit, but if you have pneumatics, it drops the motor count back down to eight. Also, my personal belief is that next year pneumatics will definitely not be as important as they were this year. This year, if you didn’t use pneumatics, you could be fine, but you definitely wanted to run pneumatics if you could.

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I doubt that they will impose any limits back onto pneumatics, at least not any severe ones such as a 2 motor penalty, because dropping the limits was the only reason so many teams purchased pneumatics this year, and it wouldn’t be very reasonable to highly incentivize the purchase of pneumatics that would only be really desirable for one season.

I could see them adding the smaller motors to the table, with some sort of trade off involved. Something like you can trade 1 big motor for 2 smaller ones, up to a maximum of 4 or something like that. Or they might just tack a few of them onto the limit with no penalties like pneumatics, but in my opinion robots are already too powerful as is, considering things like the structural integrity of the field and humans. Adding more power isn’t really justified. More variety in power applications is a good thing though, and balanced tradeoffs with the new motors could add more of that.

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