This is my first year really working with VEX and I have a few product ideas, that I think would make a lot of robots better.
First it would be great if you sold 1x1x50 aluminum L. We find it to be about the perfect piece for many parts of our robots and ripping the different c channel pieces to get 1x1 L is getting tedious and a waste of material. In general just selling aluminum in individual components would be nice as well.
Stronger elastic, something like thin surgical tubing. The vex elastic rips if it is rubbed against just about anything. It would be great if we had something a little stronger.
High strength 84 tooth gears. Currently we cut the hub off one gear and bolt it to another to be able to mount an arm on a 7 to 1 reduction. The problem is if you don’t bolt everything right the gears start to split apart, a real high strength gear would not have this problem.
Things I would love that others have mentioned
Gyro, this is just a given, we should have this by now.
Aluminum sliders - the steel ones are just way to heavy
18in shafts - its rare to need it but it would be nice to have the option
Thank you for making such a great robotics platform and I know you will keep making it better.
all of these things would be great to have! i know it may become a safety hazard to have all steel gears, but it sure would be nice to have. motors that do not overheat as easily as the current ones would be nice… probably not too realistic though…
Dude, this all sounds great, we could have used all this stuff this year. The overheating motors have been a HUGE problem for us, something really needs to be changed with those…good ideas
I completely agree. Teams went a little crazy this year with the motors, and pushed them a little too far. Just because they have a higher stall torque doesn’t mean they’re indestructible, and will never trip… You can get them to never trip if you calculate your gear ratio well.
Jordan- that may be true for some teams, but in our case, we used a torque motor for our claw. It got burned out within 10 opening and closings in the air without any resistance. We tried greasing the gears, getting rid of any friction on the mount, and a ton of other stuff. We did solve this by using two regular motors on the claw. I just see a huge problem with a high torque motor performing WORSE than a regular motor, just my opinion…
Our team hasn’t had any problems whatsoever with the 393 High Strength motors. We have had a few problems with the 269 motors… personally, I think they are the big problem. I try to use the 3-wire motors we have, and luckily we stocked up on them at Worlds last year, because you can’t get them anymore… We don’t have enough for all our robots to use only them, though.
It may have been a fluke with our setup, but after putting 10 hours into our claw mount, just to have the “High Torque” motor not work at all, I’m starting to doubt if they are that great. They work fine on all the other spots on our bot, but something is definetly wrong with either our setup, or the makeup of the motors. What I heard is that the motors have a kind of sensor that keeps track of the temperature in the motor, and if it gets over a specific level, it kind of shuts down the motor and then it takes some time for it to “reboot”
If you use a motor to apply constant pressure against something, you are holding that motor at stall. DC motors use more current when stalled than they do when running at full speed (and produce more torque, too), and this is when you are most likely to burn them out. It’s a lot better to use something other than constant motor force to grip something. If you notice, the VEX claw uses the motor to OPEN the claw, and a spring to hold it closed.
I haven’t seen your mechanism, but I’d bet a dollar you held that poor motor in a stall condition until it just gave up and died.
A motor is still in a stalled state when you are sending a power of 20 to it. It might take a little bit longer to over heat in this scenario, but its still not a great setup.
I’m sure you’re right about the trim, but its dissapointing to me that after about five seconds of running the trim, the motor would overheat. Our setup seems to be ok now, tho
just about, it can average longer…They are the 393’s…But even if we open and close the claw in the air, without any resistance, we only get about 15-20 repetitions. However, on the field, we were able to score only one stack (15 sec) before it died…Perhaps just our setup, but it still seems weird to me
I would like to see a telemetry dump utility to capture the stream of sensor and motor data from the sensors in the debugger (besides the print window).
In addition to more high strength gears, Helical gear configurations would also be nice for smooth transmission of power.
You’re expecting a DC motor to be able to hold itself together at stall torque without anything going wrong. It’s not a “flaw” if the motor can’t do that - motors aren’t exactly supposed to be able to do that.
I think I mis-understood you. Why would you want a piece bigger then 18" (36 squares)? Anything bigger would be illegal (i.e. 18x18x18 cube). 50 would be 25 inches thus too big…
Yeah, I guess the diagonal. But there isn’t full length C Channel running diagonally through a robot very often. But either way, it probably is pretty unlikely that they will make anything longer then 17.5" long. They want us to be innovative and figure it out on our own. They aren’t going to make every piece we want because they want us to figure out how to make them. I remember in 09 for Elevation, my team made our own hinge because they didn’t have them yet. But I definitely think some of the things that were mentioned on this thread should be considered.
Our setup seems to be ok now, tho