I think that’s really the whole idea behind it. It forces teams to branch out from the comfort of the standard lift mechanism. Otherwise, we’d just see a bunch of 8 bar side roller robots.
I can understand that. It will be cool to have a totally new approach to a game. Its just kinda disappointing to learn all about lifts for skyrise and then not get to use it
First off, I love how we get to use pneumatics. Could there be a way with them?
Secondly, I would like to know how to quickly and efficiently learn RobotC. I am new to robot coding, and would like to learn. Do you have any suggestions? youtube videos, other languages to learn, etc.
Thank You
I’m in the same boat, but you can’t really beat lifts in skyrise. They seem to try and make it different each year, though some knowledge may definitely transfer over.
No, you’re reading the rules correctly.
But speaking as a guy who skipped Skyrise because we couldn’t build a decent Wallbot, I really wish we could TRY this year. It’s expressly banned by the rules. Which is just unfair. We’ve got an idea for doing it in VEXU, but high school teams are entirely out of luck.
this is where I first learned ROBOTC. Though after learning the basics there I have learned so much more than I learned there by asking questions on the forums. Often if I’m trying to figure out how to do something, I Google “how to do ENTER WHAT YOU WANT TO DO HERE in C”. Even though ROBOTC isn’t ANSI-C there are similarities and this usually helps me a lot. But beware, as I said ROBOTC isn’t ANSI-C so you might run into problems for this reason.
Personally, I think vex has been trying to phase out wallbots ever since they became common in Gateway. Each of the following years has had a game that, in my opinion, has made the wallbot strategy more difficult to implement. This year, they just removed it entirely, probably to prevent a team from just blocking their opponents in the climbing zone for the entire game. I’m kind of curious what this strategy you have for a vex U wallbot is though.
After reading through another thread, it turns out that you may actually be able to have a wallbot, as long as you expand while in the climbing zone. However, the rules seem to get very tricky with determining what becomes legal and illegal. It might just be a hole the GDC accidentally left open and will close up in the first rules revision.
To top it off, <SG9> Robots may not enter (i.e. break the plane of) any Goal.
Yeah- I saw the expansion rules, and immediately thought of you guys- you have done so many good wallbots, but I don’t see a way it will work at all this year- at best an 18" robot sitting in front of the goal or low-shooting robot…
Good luck if you stick with wallbots 
Not sure why all of you are upset they made wallbots illegal. They did not make the game more entertaining to watch and honestly didn’t really pose a greater engineering challenge.
I see no problem with limiting expansion of robots. We’ve seen linkages for god knows how many years in a row now, it’s time for change.
This game is seriously great, and its going to result in some very innovative and fun to watch.
Uh-huh. You go design a 12’ Wallbot that mathematically wins every match and fits it into an 18" cube. Then, build it and get it to deploy correctly. Tell me when you’re finished. We’ve seen all kinds of lifts and intakes, but VERY few teams have made a wallbot. Fewer still who have made a working one. 2W was AMAZING to watch. And now, new teams can’t even give it a try. It’s legally verboten.
As for this game being more “interesting,” let me ask you a question. What sells more seats? Football, or Archery? Because that’s the comparison here, between Toss Up and NbN. Toss Up was a full contact game. Fighting for cylinders, large balls being catapulted around, it was FUN to watch and play. NbN is going to be four robots on the field shooting for 2 minutes. I don’t see how that can possibly be more interesting than Gateway, or Toss Up.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’ll give NbN a go. But I think the game would be better with wallbots in play.
I agree, after see these guys’ robot in action during toss-up, I couldn’t believe it fit legally or worked every time- take a look at the picture at the bottom of his post- that 8 foot or so robot fit inside 18 inches every match, and added a new challenge for teams- a moving obstacle. Personally, I don’t see where all this wallbot prejudice comes from. 1 out of mabe 50 teams would build a robot, and it would only be a threat if well-engineered, which is the purpose of the vex, right- develop engineering skills? Plus teams in the area had to start thinking of ways to get around this awesome construct. My team built a catapult. It threw things. I think that this is a weird year to ban wallbots, especially because you could shoot over one…
The thing about football is that there is always a way around the defense seeing as no lineman is as wide as the whole field. You don’t seem happy that NbN is going to be 4 robots shooting for two minutes but if you trap a team in the corner then you will see exactly that. One alliance stuck in the corner shooting human loaded balls, one robot sitting the width of the field likely not shooting unless you manage a decent shooter in with the wall sections, and another robot just cleaning up the field because it has no one to stop it.
If you’re telling me you would rather watch/play football than archery, then wallbots are not the way to go.
Also, while wallbots can be an amazing display of engineering skills, they are not answering the challenge presented by VEX each year and the basic design of a wall bot does not change game to game. You could say the same about the standard side roller and six bar lift designs but at least they had to adapt to the game pieces and scoring goal at hand.
You know, if you ask a professional athlete what the hardest thing is to do in sports, they’ll all say hit a baseball, but a coach once told me that the hardest thing to do in sports is to walk into your Superbowl locker room at half time and change the strategy that got you there 'cause it’s no longer working.
THAT is why I want to build wallbots. Are you ready to change your strategy IN FINALS, with no chance to see if it works? 99% of people aren’t. And so, they will lose.
Here, you’re just wrong. Sorry, but there’s no other way to say that.
Wallbot from Gateway
Wallbot from Sack Attack
Wallbot from Toss Up Or, check my sig.
Those are not the same design. Not even CLOSE. If you ran the same design from Gateway in Sack Attack, it wouldn’t work. And that’s true for every year. A Wallbot has to be designed to fit the field. It requires you to take the game apart, determine what you have to be able to do in order to win, and then build something to do that. If anything, it addresses the engineering challenge more-so than the standard designs because it makes you think harder. It’s a different approach to the question “How do I win the game?”
Wallbot from Sack Attack
Wallbot from Toss Up Or, check my sig.
Those are not the same design. Not even CLOSE. If you ran the same design from Gateway in Sack Attack, it wouldn’t work. And that’s true for every year. A Wallbot has to be designed to fit the field. It requires you to take the game apart, determine what you have to be able to do in order to win, and then build something to do that. If anything, it addresses the engineering challenge more-so than the standard designs because it makes you think harder. It’s a different approach to the question “How do I win the game?”
To quote the finals announcer in the gateway video: “One team engineered a wallbot, the other strategized a wallbot”
I remeber other teams panicking when they saw 127c on their opposing alliance roster, and seeing many re-coded autons to escape the grasp of the wallbot during Toss-Up.
This past year, they designed a wallbot that could extend its sides and translate in any direction at the same time- they made a wallbot that fit the challenge- it would block the base of a post.
Conversely, there was another team that built a robot that picked up a skyrise segment, pivoted its arm, dropped the segment in the base, and repeated. I believe that both of these robots were designed for the skyrise challenge, and one of them even made it to worlds. If it is acceptable to sit in a safe area and build a stacking robot, where is the challenge? Improving speed? I would rather see multiple methods of scoring than 800 of the same way, at 800 different speeds.
I personally don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wallbots, in fact, there en engineering marvel. However, even though the design has to change from year to year I think VEX wants us to do something completely different. Banning wallbots does this, and I see nothing wrong with that. I also hope that VEX won’t continually have a ban on walbots. What would be cool is to every year have some kind of curve ball thrown at us in the limitations in how we may design our robot.
BTW, my team’s robot design was a stationary robot that grabs skyrise sections and drops then into the base. but it was also designed to grab cubes. However we never really got it working well, still glad we tried though.
I like the de facto no robots rule. Think it presents an entirely different challenge. Let’s innovate some new things that work.
I still believe this can be a great defensive game, or maybe just a ramming game. Ramming will occur a la 2014 FRC.
I still would like more pneumatic tanks in the VEX U division (4 would be awesome).
It’s such a far cry after we had 28 on our robot from Toss Up.
Ephemeral_Being,
Wallbots are not illegal, you just need to design a different kind of one. Build a 10 motor, super high speed chassis (like 5:1), and you will be the fastest robot out there. Then, just block the alliance from scoring by always being directly in front of them, preventing them from being able to reliably score depending on their design. I would love to see a robot like that out there, very fun to watch, unique, and hard to drive. Throughout the season, you could improve your design, become better and better at driving, and even develop a way to lift your partners at the end of the match. Possibly even make a transmission so you can push the other robots.
I personally won’t be building anything like that, but I just wanted to provide some ideas because it seems as though your view on this game has been pretty bleak thus far. Anyways, there are many ways to reach the same objective, you just need think outside the box, or in this case, inside the box
-Nick, 8000
You made a good point on what the only effective form of “wallbot” will be. I suppose it would fit more under the definition of “D-bot” since it doesn’t really form a wall of any type, but that’s just semantics.
However, I’m horrified to see that as the only type of D-bot. For one thing, it can only defend one robot at once, and it wouldn’t even be able to shut that robot down 100%, no matter how well it was built or how well it is driven, thanks in part to matchloads aplenty. Granted, that does remain to be seen. Additionally, there is a lot less of an engineering challenge to build a fast robot that repeatedly hits opponents than an extending wallbot that reaches key areas in autonomous and/or dismounts from the higher bases with consistency.
To sum up all my points, D-bots this year require less skill, are perhaps more destructive, and are less effective and consistent. I’m a huge fan of D-bots but I’m definitely not going to build one this year because it doesn’t seem enjoyable, challenging, or effective.