Overall, I think people shouldn’t get too worked up about Vex.
In general they have good products, good stock and great customer service.
This product/family is turning into a flop with all the issues mentioned previously. It is however one product in a long line of Vex. Just stinks that it is such a highly visible product.
It maybe too late this season to reconcile everything people hoped for. I’m expecting much better things from Falcon 2.0 though
My team generally has this approach, with the caveat that we always want to try new tech in an easily-accessible/replaceable way. It’s a great strategy since it constantly exposes students to figuring out solutions to never-before-seen problems, helps them understand the risk / reward of new tech, and overall sets us up to stay close to the leading edge of what’s available in our small, niche, market.
As for the Falcons, this won’t deter us from using them in the future. It just makes us put as much design consideration into them as the NEOs (and those encoder wires…). It also really goes to show that the CIM and MiniCIM are still great 100% reliable options where there is weight and space available.
Let’s not lose here that they chose to make it a highly visible product – I would certainly be held to a higher standard if I made this claim on a product:
You haven’t figured out yet that advertising hype is just that, and should always be ignored?
@Jon_Jack will Vex be sending an email out to teams who purchased the Falcon 500 to advise them to apply Loctite to their motors? I know there are lots of teams who don’t read Chief and may not visit the Falcon 500 page of the Vex website again until next season, and am wondering if I should reach out to teams I have contacts with and alert them to apply this fix to their motors as well.
Should teams be expected to not believe it?
I sure don’t anymore.
Jon Jack has been typing for a half hour. I’m starting to get scared lol
I don’t know. A person has to figure out how to detect BS, and where it is prevalent. I have observed that advertising is one of the three pillars of BS, so I believe none of it.
I still consider false advertising to this degree that targets the group this did as predatory and a little bit more than just “BS”
Hey Vex should be happy they aren’t totally a meme
Can we please try to keep the posts on here substantive and avoid one sentence replies, observations about who is typing, and non-sequitur about suppliers becoming “a meme”? Let’s stay focused on discussing this critical quality issue and the impacts it will have on teams this year.
Maybe you learned something about advertising, from this? We can only hope.
I learned something about Vex, that’s for certain.
As noted several places on our website, the shaft is zinc plated steel.
The goal was to keep the mounting holes on the same bolt circle as a CIM. This wouldn’t have been the case if we put the mounting holes in the corners of a hex profile; we wanted to prioritize the ability to interface with many existing gearboxes and other products.
Creating a proprietary ecosystem seems to be a major concern of yours. I can sympathize with that, which is why we made sure that it was compatible with gearboxes designed for the CIM (and therefore a majority of COTS gearboxes used in FRC).
We would be happy to review your concerns and send a replacement shaft if you contact [email protected] or fill out the RMA form on our website.
The 8T pinion was a major consideration, yes. We actually wanted to try and get down to the 6T, but couldn’t make it work. We did explore small hex, but had some concerns about the torsional and flexural strength of small hex (~1/4") vs. a larger spline.
Outside of the VP coupler, I am unaware of any long term (greater than a few days) outages on any other Falcon pinions or shafts. Do you care to elaborate on this?
This is something we are working on and will be out later today.
This is not a trivial thing. Not having the coupler for the VP is a major failure to me.
I stood corrected earlier about the output shaft material and stated that my other points still stood.
Then why not make the mount holes blind so a screw would bottom out instead of seizing the motor?
This I was speaking more about the relative difficulty of getting pinions at the beginning of the build season, and also yes, the VP coupler. And that when the pinions did finally ship, additional work needed to be done by teams to use them. Plus like I said in my other posts, it was hard enough just to get the motor to begin with.
Not that they couldn’t have done this, but there are plenty of other motors that have the same thing. Our team has locked up a bag motor this year and a redline last year.
This is actually pretty difficult to do from a design perspective without using a really thick plate or substantially increasing cost. For what it’s worth other motors like the BAG and Neo can also encounter this issue.
Does this not seem like something that should be iterated on?
I guess my mind is still stuck on Cim or minicim vs falcon
