What benefits are there to using the full field instead of the low cost one, and how much does each cost to make? (URLs are greatly appreciated)
Thanks
Well…it really depends year to year. In any particular case, having 100% of the field never gives a team a strategic advantage over the other, but having essential parts of the field made can be helpful.
Take this past year for example, the racks and the central scoring area were really important to be able to test on and work with. My team built without either one and then we had to spend hours at practice facility making adjustments.
As far as buying a full field is concerned, I think that having an official might be mentally comforting, but I’m not sure if it makes a big difference as far as performance is concerned.
We seemed to do pretty well last season as rookies with a home made field on our back porch: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21178067@N02/3533703569/
Using Walmart exercise mats ($17per six mat set), goal and field elements made by a supportive mechanical engineer from aluminum and plywood (probably about $50 worth), hockey tape (and later first aid tape, about $2) and some corrugated material from Home Depot ($8), and no perimeter, we managed to win the Inspire Award at our first qualifier and ranked 9th out of 24 in the state championship, finishing out with a Finalist Alliance Award.
By the end of the season, we’d gotten the full complement of mats, and I think the whole thing cost us about $175.
We’d really like to have a perimeter this year and may or may not rough in all the elements again ourselves, depending on what the challenge is. But I don’t think it’s as necessary to have an “official” field, so much as to have everything accurately placed on the field, as per the design drawings.
Terri
Full field borders can be purchased from LogoLoc (http://www.logoloc.com/first/RNR/2009GameKits/Practicefloor.html) or IFI (http://www.vexrobotics.com/vex-competitions.shtml). The LogoLoc field is $500 but they’re currently sold out. The IFI field is $750 and is made of better material (IMHO).
Also on the IFI website is instructions for building a low-cost field border made out of PVC and plywood (http://www.vexrobotics.com/docs/vex-robotics-competition-field/low-cost-perimeter-rev-c.20090427.pdf). I’ve seen some teams with those and they work out nicely.
Official field tiles can be purchased from Softtiles (www.softtiles.com). If you call them and state that you are with an FTC team, they will give you a discount (see https://www.softtiles.com/content/view/52/1/).
Otherwise, I agree with ttldomination’s post about seeing what the game is as to what else to buy and to whether you need a full field or not.
The IFI field is much better. The official FIRST fields are junk IMHO.
AndyMark currently carries the field perimeter for the FTC fields.
around $770 (cost + shipping).
We have a full sized field and it does help because you can see how much time it take to do tasks, and we do drive practice with our sister team and run full matches agented each other and that helps a lot with strategy and driving. Also it is nice for doing demos. We use that same mats every year (we don’t let people walk on them with shoes, so the don’t get ruined as fast) and just make the components of the field every year. My point is that there is an advantage of having a full field to test and practice on.
I’m just saying. a wood field is easy to build, cheap, and easy to assemble and take with you for demos. our’s assembles in 4 pieces and just requires some wood screws to lock together.
To clarify Derrick’s post (FTC 4240).
Although we have a full field, it is a wooden one. I think Derrick’s point was that a full field (even if it’s not a nice official metal/glass one) is better than a partial field.
Where we run into trouble sometimes is when the field elements attach to the side walls and the spacing ends up not being the same because the materials aren’t the same.
Eg: our low goals ended up being about 1/4" higher than the offical goals. Our mechanism worked at home, but not on the real field. Although the rules say to allow 1" error on positioning, it’s just not practical in some instances. Having the perfect setup is really needed in some cases. Since the plans show how to make a field element to fit on the official perimeter, it just doesn’t fit the same on a wooden or plastic field.
The devil is in the details. Maybe one day we will be able to afforst a real field.
We do see a difference between wooden field and metal field. Dispenser mounted on the metal field flexes away more, which affects how the baton projects forward on the L bracket. Thats why we have an arm to capture and control the tilt of the dispenser.
John
Landroids 4220
We have made a design improvement to the AndyMark FTC Field so that the price was reduced to $689.
This design improvement was simply the removal of the vertical aluminum spacers at the joints and the addition of silicone adhesive to hold the polycarbonate into the rail slot. Now, all of the side panels are one piece (two rails and one polycarbonate sheet) with no vertical spacers. There are less pieces, more rigidity, and less items for the robot to snag during game play.
Sincerely,
Andy Baker
Are any other dimensions different or is there any reason this modification could/should not be applied to a v2 revision of the field? Assuming no, could you specify the brand of adhesive? We have a v2 and teams were understandably unhappy to see all the snag points.
We used very standard silicone adhesive, found at most hardware stores. GE is the brand we used. However, other brands would work well also.
Sincerely,
Andy
Actually the low goals on the Edison fields at world were (at best) 3/8" lower than shown in the Q&A (The Game - Playing Field 6) – we got permission and measured during lunch on the first day. Two of them were at 3-1/4, one of them was at 3", and one was 2-7/8". Since the Q&A says they were supposed to be at 3-5/8 we were disappointed and had to scrap one of our coolest autonomous routines as we were not able to get to a dispenser below 3-1/8". Note that all of them were within the 1" tolerance allowed by the rules, it just wasn’t any fun for us as we expected the fields to be better than they were!
BTW, the autonomous that we scrapped could do 100 points when it worked perfect (in practice)… dump the initial 5 (30 pts), cross to the other side (10), empty the dispenser next to our low goal (30), while shooting (using a paddle like last year) all of the batons that we dispensed into our own one point goal (30 more). When it worked it was beautiful… At world we were only able to try it one time (on the red high dispenser) and it didn’t line up right…