A lot of people are talking about how overpowered pneumatics are going to be in this year’s game but so far I haven’t seen any ideas for pneumatics that give teams who have them a decisive advantage. I’ve seen them used effectively in vex as launchers, brakes, or claws, but I don’t think these uses are going to be very important for this game. I’ve also seen some say that pneumatics can be used as a mogo lift to save a motor, but I’ve heard pneumatics aren’t strong enough to lift a mogo. What do you guys think?
The most common use I’ve been hearing for pneumatics is for a 2-speed drivetrain. The idea is a fast speed for auto (getting the neutral goals quickly) and maybe for playing defense, and a slower speed for carrying mobile goals and getting onto the bridge.
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Each pneumatic cylinder gives you an additional degree of freedom to perform an independent action, without tapping into the precious limit of 8 available motors.
You don’t need a lot of force or power to activate a lock on a mobile goal or trigger a one time lift mechanism which has its energy stored in elastics.
Also, as @FRC973 said, pneumatics is super useful for transmissions where you could shift motors from powering your drivetrain to another mechanism like a mogo or ring lift.
I could easily see it used in TiP for:
- Ring claw
- Triggering kickstand
- Locking Mogo on a tray
- Activating elastics powered mogo lift
- Actuating inclination of the ring claw
- 2-speed drive Transmission
- Drive to ring lift transmission
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Some simpler uses could be to hold back deploys or to just kick a ringle into the mobile goal during auton reliably.
in FRC we used a piston (with some loose tolerance on the hole and peg) to hold back our climbing mech for Infinite Recharge. I think the lift was tensioned with 10?lb constant force springs but the principles should work similarly for vex. If teams are wanting to dedicate 6 or maybe even 8 motors to a drive, using pneumatics to pick up the work that those motors would have otherwise done would be wise.
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Which of these uses do you think would be most common or useful for this game? Like realistically, I don’t think many teams are going to be building reliable transmissions because of their complexity and how much space they take up.
I was thinking of using it to push rings of a passive intake.
our team wants to use them as a goal clamp/holder, so we can still move fast and not worry about it sliding out, and an extra boost to our lift, so we can reach that top rung
many uses really. Anything that doesn’t need continuous rotation, doesn’t need a range of positions, or has a demand of high power for many uses.
A few things I can think of off the top of my head:
- goal lift
- brake pad under robot
- 2 speed drive transmission
- Shifting gearbox to redirect a motor’s power from one mechanism to the other
- Acceleration boost at the start of the match
- Lifting assistance
- Little one time catapult for launching a preload quickly into an alliance goal as soon as auton starts
- any sort of claw
- shifting X drive
the applications go on.
early season I would agree with you, but if the only downside is complexity and space, you can bet on seeing teams use them once the neutral goal rush gets competitive. You could have your drive start at something like 600 rpm, which is ridiculously fast, far too fast to run for a whole match, which is why you could use pneumatics to shift back to a reasonable speed after you reach that tall goal. Of course, acceleration would be an issue, but you could also use pneumatics to solve that problem, by adding some kind of boosters that give you a speedy push-off against the floor or the field perimeter. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes fairly common by worlds.
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