pic: FTC Custom Drive Train

[Jeremy Germita]

Looks great! I love how flexible the FTC rules are getting and I'm excited to see how teams are taking advantage of those rules.

Remember that FTC fields are 12' square(thus far), 6-7 feet per second would clear the field in about 2 seconds. That's ridiculously fast for this scale. Scaling that up to FRC field sizes, it's like gearing for 30+fps free speed.

Here is a custom FTC drivetrain I built a couple of years ago. I clocked it at just under 3 feet per second without any mechanisms on the robot, but it ended up being about 2.5 f/s during competition. I found it was on the cusp of controllability on an FTC field. When 72 made v2 of that drivetrain last season, they geared it for 4fps and the NXT loop execution rate was definitely too slow to control the drivetrain without lag. It would travel about 4-6" between motor controller updates.

Just a warning. These may or may not be valid concerns for the 2015-16 game and control system .