Now that the new FTC system has been announced, I will share some of my opinions on the kit, based upon checking out the kit first hand over the past month while we built one of the FTC robots using the new kit. (Note: while I had some chances to play with it over the past month, most of my time went into working on our NI Prototype Robot with the new FRC control system.)
So here are my thoughts on the new FTC kits based on my experience so far:
The new FTC kit lacks any sort of continuity. Most of the metal parts are stamped with center to center hole spacing of 0.625 inches. The standoffs given to teams are in 0.5 increments. This makes it really difficult to make perpendicular things line up. If you want a relation in real world terms, the new FTC kit is like watching
Back to the Future III without ever seeing the first two.
Most of the new parts are overkill [or underkill]. On a robot that weighs at most ten or fifteen pounds, do we really
need structural members than can support fifty pounds of weight?
Kind of a sub point to this: the size (I call it overkill factor) of the new parts really makes working with Vex sized (dimensions between 12" and 18" cubed) robots difficult. The new Lynxmotion parts really seem best suited for larger robots, such as between 18" and 24"-ish cubed.
At the same time, the huge amount of NXT Mindstorms parts included in the kit really make anything larger than 12" cubed difficult to work with...
It's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the first one is too big and the second it too small. At least letting us use all the Vex mechanical parts in next years game will fill that "just right" size category.
It needs adapters to mate directly with Vex axles/wheels. While control system wise, the new FTC kit is ahead of the old Vex kits, mechanically, it is lacking way behind. And using the logic that it took Vex a few years to come out with the whole range of products they have today is missing the obvious point:
Vex has all these neat products on the market right now. Not a year away, not two years away, but right now. And when we are limited to only three different size spur gears in the FTC kit, and a few different size regular wheels, and most FTC teams already have a bunch of Vex omni wheels, advanced gear kits, roller chain, etc. I feel like purposely trying to alienate one brand for another is quite a bad decision on behalf of the teams.
These are the main issues that I have with the new kits; as such right now I feel like this kit is a barely manageable attempt to cobble anything and everything together. The kit will work, it is neither an elegant solution nor an efficient robotics kit.
If FIRST is actively seeking feedback on this issue, and expresses an interest in trying to solve some of these annoying issues (or alter the format of FTC to match these new 'quirks'), then I will reconsider the above points. Until then, if I had to grade the new kit, I'd give it between a C- and a C+. It has potential if there are major changes to streamline and bring continuity to the kit, but until then it's just a lot of public jabs at Vex (which IMHO is quite unprofessional), while it suffers through a lot of swings and misses with its own kit. Our friends from Texas have the perfect phrase for this: all hat and no cattle.