Its easy don’t worry. But you will need to practice how to manage air leakages
i agree here, your robot will be less powerful without it, but we just have to move on. The best way to refute a broken system is to exploit it
From doing FRC a number of years with pneumatics the VEX system is very limited. Unless there are some new pistons and bigger, lighter tanks in the pipeline, they are more hassle than they are worth.
The air supply is limited and finite, it’s easy to blow through your air and at the end of the match be out of air and stuck. Lets take the example of using a piston to open/close your claw that lets you snag rings. As you get to the end, the piston opens/closes slower and at a point it won’t move and you are done. It’s almost impossible to blow through a full battery charge with 8 motors in 3 minutes.
Engineering is harder, the pistons are full direction motion, unless you are putting stops in to stop movement you get the full throw.
Lastly, air leaks are killers. You must cut the tubing exactly square and seat it fully in the connector.
While many of you subscribe to the “as much powers to,your robot as possible” school of design, i think the added weight and limited functionality vs the cost and aggravating additional work isn’t worth the trade.
I think the recent posts about presenting the system will be good, I look forward to those tutorials and more importantly the testing to seee what the full capabilities are.
pneumatics are less useful for a frequent and power intensive task than they are for infrequent actuations. I expect we might start seeing 2 speed transmissions on drives, and lots of pneumatically powered functions like goal lifts this season. I am excited about the newly viable opportunities, I just think it should come at a reasonable tradeoff.
2 speed drives are not very useful
I can think of a few good uses for them this season. whether it’s worth the complexity is another matter.
A two speed transmission with pneumatics on a drive, I have seen to be both heavy, clunky, and have efficiency loss. NOT worth it especially with V5.
Here is some information I put together several years ago to supplement the VEX information, and I look forward to seeing some of the tutorial work being done. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HLdEjg2xcbALeKR_u67Xit3hBY0AFEE1/view?usp=sharing
As other have said, the small pneumatic cylinders available for VRC teams are a bit limited in use, good for making small actuators and such. Don’t plan on air cylinders lifting your arm and such, unless you’re in VEX-U where there are no limits on pneumatics. You’ll get 6-12 pounds of force from an air cylinder, depending on the pressure you use. Back before V5 and the “pneumatics penalty” a common use on many of our teams was to lock “flip-out” assemblies in place to maintain starting size (second most common was quick-acting claws).
pnumatic mogo grabber maybe? would have to band in order to try not to lose all the air
Case in point, back in Toss Up for VEX U in 2014 we made a 28 tank fully pneumatic 6-bar lift. It was a pain to both move around and inflate via our bike pump but we did it.
During Worlds we brought it back down to 20 tanks due to weight concerns.