As teams start to design their new builds for the upcoming FTC season, I wanted to inform everybody of some brand new elements for TETRIX that will be made available for this season. All parts are currently in production and should be available by November 1 pending any production delays.
With the announcment of “Ring it Up” we are very excited to be able to bring these elements to FIRST to help teams engineer exciting solutions for this years game challenge.
I understand that we may be in a minority in this regard, but for teams in Washington, the FTC season is very much underway and the first competitions are a about a month and a half away – or about two weeks after your target date for these new parts.
It’d be helpful if improvements like this were available to all teams at kickoff and that our programs are not put at a potential disadvantage when competing at the national/worldwide level because products aren’t available at kickoff.
To be fair some of these were listed in one of the Pitsco catalogs that came out around kickoff. (Not the slides though) However I agree that A) more information is always better and B) it would have been nice to have them available at kick off. It’s not like the game was a mystery to the GDC far enough in advance to prime the part pump earlier.
How does it matter (is it ‘fair’?) where the parts are listed if they’re not available to ship until 75% of the way through one team’s build season and only 33% of the way through another team’s? Virginia qualifiers start in December, so while we’re not quite as bad off as Madison’s group it’s still led us down a much different path for the teams.
I’m interested in seeing how the servo bracket adjusts. That part could have saved us some time/rework in previous years, depending on how it’s done.
The part images are up on parts.ftcrobots.com as of yesterday evening. I think I like the adjustable servo bracket and the inside C connector best out of the new stuff. The flats could be handy at times; usually we just cut and drill a piece of sheet aluminum when we need something like that, but it could be a time saver.
Awesome! Quick question though.
Are the Linear slides/rack and pinions going to be leased in November as well? They aren’t currently listed on the website.
Thanks!
-Lancer 3415
I was seeing these new parts yesterday and the left side view narrower by type of part was giving a total ALL parts at >100. Scrolling through this view showed many new items.
Today the ALL total is back down to 90 items, however some new items can still be detected via search, at least if you know what words to use.
You are correct that the Linear pack is not listed. This is due to the production samples not meeting our quality of expectation. Unfortunantly this has put a little more delay on this pack, but this change was a necessity. Our objective is to make sure that we release the best quality product so that TETRIX users are satisfied with the hardware. We WILL NOT release a product that does not meet our standards so that students to not have a negative experience.
