Re: New FTC Platform
 

After thinking about potential ways to improve the new FTC kits for a while, I came to the conclusion that in addition to easily mating with all the Vex gears, wheels, and sprockets/chain, there should also be something "new" in the FTC kits. Pneumatics.

Give teams the choice of two or three different stroke lengths, and the choice of one or two air accumulators. And if you want to make it difficult, limit the number of potential motors used on the robot if they choose to use pneumatics.

Many of the issues that I had previously identified with the FTC kits (lack of a multitude of different gears and overall kit consistency) could be circumvented with use of pneumatics.

Re: New FTC Platform
 

Me too!!3!! How about making the IFI/Vex pneumatics legal in the new system? They don't cost too much and they are in the right scale.

Re: New FTC Platform
 

Pneumatics are nice but I'm not sure I would use the VEX ones. They less than 2inchs of stroke. Although I'm sure they would have some uses, I don't think less than 2in of stroke is going to be all that useful most of the time. VEX Pneumatics Page.

Re: New FTC Platform
 

Two inches isn't so bad on a FTC scale, but that's just detail. Having pneumatics, wherever they come from, would be one more interesting engineering element to play with -- and that's a good thing.

Re: New FTC Platform
 

or alternatively, have some DC-motor driven linear actuators...

Re: New FTC Platform
 

You could always make your own.

Re: New FTC Platform
 

A message from Team Unlimited.

We finally got all the pictures up of the new FTC kit online at our site (http://eaglevex.syraweb.org/FTCplatform.htm). There are two set of thumbnails:
1st set - Small images that have lower quality
2nd set - Large images that have full quality for viewing the parts in more detail.

We are still working on the images of Atlanta, but we thought the images from the new kit would be more useful to teams.