Summer VEX Projects?

[Donut]

Well summer is coming up again in a month or two, and I know a number of people had some fun prototyping with VEX last year, so, what's everyone's plans for VEX summer projects this year? It doesn't have to be related to FVC, just involving VEX parts.

After the fun I had last summer making a 2-speed transmission, I've decided I'd like to take a stab at an even better one this year, and I've come up with both a compact shaft based design and a better meshing dog gear design that I'd like to try. I have to ask; did any FVC teams this year even consider a 2-speed for actual competition? I think I can make them VEX legal, but I'm not sure if teams really have an interest in them.

[Gdeaver]

This would not be legal for a Vex competition. There is a new high torque inteligent servo on the market. Look at this link.http://www.crustcrawler.com/products...ex.php?prod=63
This is a serial controled servo with position and velocity feed back. Would be a nice little project to figure out the mounting to vex components. Also, programing could take some work.

[doukjin]

Originally Posted by Donut

After the fun I had last summer making a 2-speed transmission, I've decided I'd like to take a stab at an even better one this year, and I've come up with both a compact shaft based design and a better meshing dog gear design that I'd like to try. I have to ask; did any FVC teams this year even consider a 2-speed for actual competition? I think I can make them VEX legal, but I'm not sure if teams really have an interest in them.

i know for a fact that at one point 2024 used a 2 speed which was fantastic

our team [1002] was also considering it, but we decided we needed the other motors more

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

This would not be legal for a Vex competition. There is a new high torque inteligent servo on the market. Look at this link.http://www.crustcrawler.com/products...ex.php?prod=63
This is a serial controled servo with position and velocity feed back. Would be a nice little project to figure out the mounting to vex components. Also, programing could take some work.

That servo can draw 900 mA It looks pretty awesome though, alot of fancy feedback loops could be possible with those.

[MGoelz]

I plan on doing some prototyping for FRC using VEX. One of my fellow teammates and his friend have VEX kits, so that's what we're going to do.
We also might start playing around with random ideas that could actually be implemented in VEX, since we want the CyberStangs (our middle school VEX team) to be able to compete next year.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Donut

Well summer is coming up again in a month or two, and I know a number of people had some fun prototyping with VEX last year, so, what's everyone's plans for VEX summer projects this year? It doesn't have to be related to FVC, just involving VEX parts.

After the fun I had last summer making a 2-speed transmission, I've decided I'd like to take a stab at an even better one this year, and I've come up with both a compact shaft based design and a better meshing dog gear design that I'd like to try. I have to ask; did any FVC teams this year even consider a 2-speed for actual competition? I think I can make them VEX legal, but I'm not sure if teams really have an interest in them.

Posting the specs on a good second generation 2-speed would be a good idea.

I suggest building one with medium-speed and slow-speed options, rather than one designed for fast and faster. The field is small enough, and crowded enough, to make high speeds hard to use well, but high-torque is very useful when opposing robots butt heads.

Blake

[Cartwright]

Like MGoelz said, we're working on some VEX stuff to prototype ideas for FRC. And we may use it for other projects for our team. VEX really has helped me advance in FRC as a freshman.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

I've "finished" my 2007 FRC Vex prototype, a little late. However, I have 2 kits and with the second I'm going to make a motorized cart for my robot with a scissors lift and a ramp system, a possible prototype for a new cart for 648.

[rswsmay]

We have yet to decide on what summer Vex project to work on. Ideas on the table right now are:
1. Integrating a combination Gyro/accelerometer
2. Using a bluetooth module on the TX/RX ports for feedback
3. Build and program the Vexlabs version of the Dodge Tomahawk

I know that there are other that have already started or even successfully done these, but never the less it would definately be a challenge for our FVC team.

[gdo]

Team Unlimited (FVC 2013) designed and used a gear shifter in their competiton robot. We recently made a model of the shifter in Maya 8, and some pics are posted (or being posted) currently here in CD-Media. At the current time only this:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/28489
Photo is posted. More are being posted and should be up soon. Our team is posting some information on the shifter at our site:
http://eaglevex.syraweb.org
The information should be up in a day or two hopefully. There are some pictures of the prototype design are in the photo gallery on our site under summer projects.

UPDATE:
We got the information posted on our shifter.

It can be found here: http://eaglevex.syraweb.org/GearShifter.htm

Some prototype designs can be seen here: http://eaglevex.syraweb.org/MiscSummer2006.htm

And the robot can be found:
http://eaglevex.syraweb.org/QCC2006.htm
http://eaglevex.syraweb.org/Hartford2006.htm

For the shafter encoder, it is placed on the "block gear" (three wide gear) and it worked very well in autonomous. Hope our post on our site helps with any question, if you have any more question, you can PM, AIM or MSN me.

~Team Unlimited, FVC 2013

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Update: I've dropped the motorized cart idea in hopes to build a very small robot... possibly only 5 inches long by 4 inches wide in hopes that I can smuggle it into work and show it off behind my boss's back.

[Cooley744]

I know that a couple of the guys on my team are thinking about making a submarine vex bot...but it will be a pretty big project considering all the sealing that they will have to do, just to keep the water out.

[Graham Donaldson]

Going for the classic ping-pong ball shooting robot... but the catch is, I'm trying to do it with as little extra parts from the starter kit as possible (1 tread kit, 1 chain kit, 1 metal kit, 1 gear kit, and 1 or 2 motors, but that's it).

[thefro526]

As I speak I am printing some Vex Mecanums on a Rapid Prototyping Machine. So I am probably going to make a Mecanum drive with full suspension. Also I bought this awsome mini Poofball and I am going to try to shoot it about ~25ft. I'll probably try some PID loops too.

[JesseK]

I'm currently making a 2-speed robot to play this year's FRC game with the full-sized tubes to score on the low part of the rack. The cool thing is, I can dismout the tube manipulator and attach a (student-made and not currently used) claw for the FVC game that can score 4 balls at a time for some added fun with the current FVC students.

I'm also considering dropping the 2-speed drive train in favor of an 8-wheel 4-motor omni drive so I can come up with some control algorithms to be used on a future FRC bot.