Tools

What a pair of gears does to your speed and torque, how far apart to mount them, and how many holes that works out to.

Follow motor torque through gears, chain, an arm, a wheel or a pulley block to the force at the load, and see the speed and power it costs.

Cartridge, gearing and wheel size in, top speed in ft/s out. The most asked question in VEX, with an honest note on what it leaves out.

How far one wheel turn takes you, and how many turns to reach a target distance. The basis of a simple autonomous.

V5RC caps motor power in watts, not motor count. Check your drive against the 55W subsystem cap and your robot against the 88W total.

What a chain run does to speed and torque, plus the direction difference that makes robots drive backwards.

Exact center distance for any gear pair, which holes that lands on, and the diagonal offsets to use when they cannot share a rail.

Two, three or four stages at once: the reduction they give, what friction takes back, and how much play reaches the output. The efficiency and the play are yours to measure.

How many links a run needs, and what center distance a whole number of links actually gives you. Chain pitch is yours to measure, not mine to guess.

Which spacers and washers stack to the exact width you need, using the fewest pieces. Solved properly, not by grabbing the biggest that fits.

Does the chassis fit the starting cube once wheels, screw heads and motors are counted rather than just the frame?

How fast the robot turns, how much room it needs to do it, and why a long drivebase fights you every time.

Whether your drive is limited by motor torque or by wheels slipping. Most teams guess wrong, then rebuild the wrong half.

Put a load on the drive and see where it settles on the torque curve: how much speed you keep, and how close you are to stalling.

Top speed is the wrong number for a 12 foot field. How long you really take, and how much of your quoted speed you never see.

How hard you can accelerate, brake and turn before going over, with a raised lift included. Robots tip while carrying a load, not while empty.

List what is on the robot and where, and find the balance point. Feeds straight into the tipping calculator.

One set of motors and wheels, four layouts. Tank, X-drive, mecanum and H-drive on speed, strafing, pushing power and motor cost.

An X-drive is faster than the same parts on tank, but not in the direction most people assume, and not for free.

Whether a charge lasts the day. The battery supplies far more than the rules let you fit, which is why brownouts are rarely a power problem.

How far the battery dips when every motor pulls at once, what is lost as heat, and how to measure your battery rather than guess.

Turns drive geometry into the encoder numbers autonomous code needs, then tells you to calibrate anyway, and why.

The speed calculator backwards. Name a speed and get every real VEX gear pair that comes close, ranked by how close.

Collapsed height, maximum reach and travel for a double reverse four bar, and whether it starts inside the size cube.

Sizes a single pivoting arm: height, torque, and how far the intake tilts on the way up, which is what decides whether a two-bar suits the job at all.

Line tension for a cascade, how much of it is friction rather than weight, and whether the geometry lets the stages slide at all.

Reach, height and torque for a six-bar, solved from the linkage rather than from a formula that only holds at one set of proportions.

Height, sweep and torque for a four-bar, plus the angle at which the two bars collide, which is usually what limits travel rather than anything you chose.

The torque a lift needs to raise and hold its load, worst case included, and whether your motors and gearing supply it.

How long a lift really takes under load, and which of the gear ratios that actually mesh gets it there quickest.

Where to anchor #64 bands on a 4-bar, between the two bars or from the tower, so the assist curve matches gravity instead of fighting it. Band force is measured from your own bands, not assumed.

Torque, speed, stability and the shaft carrying it, checked together. A lift can pass all four alone and still tip the robot.

Roller speed, compression and throughput together. First it checks whether your intake pulls objects in at all, which is not a given.

Where a shot lands, how fast it must leave to get there, and the two launch angles that both hit the same target. One of them is almost always better.

Surface speed, gearing, compression and stored energy together. A single flywheel launches at half its surface speed, which is the error most flywheel maths makes.

What your bands store, how much reaches the object, and how long the motors need to wind it back. The arm keeps more of that energy than people expect.

Flywheel, catapult or puncher for the shot you need. They differ far less in cycle rate than people assume, because all three hit the same power limit.

Success rate, jams, double feeds and bounce-outs across repeated trials, with the failure modes separated.

Hit rate, grouping and standard deviation from real shots, instead of tuning a shooter by feel.

Energy lost per shot and how long until the flywheel is ready to fire again.

How hard a pneumatic cylinder pushes, and what pressure a given force would need. Stroke never changes the force.

The torque a cylinder puts on a pivoting arm across its whole sweep, and whether the geometry ever passes through dead center.

Every hole you could anchor a cylinder to, sorted into the ones that drive your mechanism and the ones that fail, with the reason for each failure.

Whether a cylinder or a motor can do a job, and what each one costs the rest of the robot in watts or in air.

Air consumed across autonomous and driver control, and whether a usable reserve survives to the end of the match.

Compare pressures and mechanism revisions on success rate and categorized failures.

Turns field coordinates into the distances, headings and turns an autonomous program needs.

Whether a route fits the 15 second autonomous period, and which step is eating the time.

Compares route orders on distance, time and mechanism actions to find the ordering that fits.

Measure the voltage your mechanism wastes on friction, the volts per unit of speed, and what accelerating costs.

The constant that holds an arm up on its own, so the PID only has to correct what is unpredictable.

Whether one tune is really better than another, or whether the difference is the same controller having a good day.

Turns logged trial data into overshoot, rise time, settling time and steady-state error, so tuning has evidence behind it.

Tune a drive-to-distance PID on a model of your own drivetrain first: rise, overshoot and settling for your gains, before the robot wears a single part.

Corrects wheel scale and tracking offsets from measured robot movement. The companion to Odometry Ticks per Inch.

How far your tracking estimate wanders along your own route, from the errors you measure, and which one costs you most.

Where your autonomous really ends up, run after run: how far the group sits off the mark and how widely it scatters.

How finely your tracking wheels see movement, and how much a small mistake measuring their size or position costs by the end of a routine.

Enter tracking wheel readings step by step and watch the position update work out where the robot is, with the path drawn and the maths shown.

Combines several sensor sources into one position or heading estimate, and flags when they disagree.

How fast your inertial sensor wanders while the robot sits still, what that costs in inches by the end of a routine, and when it stops being trustworthy.

Where to put the threshold on a reflectance sensor, from readings taken on the real field, and how often it will get the call wrong there.

Describe your robot once and every tool that needs these numbers starts from them. Saved in this browser only, never uploaded.

Two motors doing two jobs, with a power take-off or a differential: each job’s speed and torque in each setting.

A running total of your robot’s weight by subsystem, from parts you weighed, against a target you set. Parts not weighed are counted, never guessed.

Inches and millimeters, inch-pounds and newton-meters, rpm and degrees per second: every conversion a team makes, from exact definitions.

How much charge a match really takes, from the current your robot draws, and how many batteries a competition day needs.

Every subsystem checked against every other at once. Individually sound choices can still add up to an illegal or unstable robot.

Whether the torque going through a shaft will twist it. One motor on a red cartridge out-torques a standard VEX shaft with no gearing at all.

How far a loaded shaft bends, measured against the gear tooth that has to stay meshed. Bending is what usually goes wrong, not breaking.

What each bearing actually carries. Hang a wheel past its bearings and the inner one takes more than the whole load while the outer one is pushed backwards.

Measure a motor’s speed and torque at a few loads and see its real speed-torque line beside the published one.

Reads V5 motor telemetry for current imbalance, heat, binding, efficiency and stall risk across a mechanism.

Success rates from your own counted trials, each with a 95% confidence range, so you can see whether two versions are actually different.

One big button to time practice runs, a list you can fix, and a match clock. Sends every time to the statistics tools in one tap.

Paste a set of measurements and see the typical value, how much runs vary, and a range for the true average. An average without a range is half an answer.

Checks whether an odd-looking run really sits apart, with two methods the odd run cannot bend. It flags and never deletes.

How many runs a test needs before its answer means anything, and what the runs you can afford will actually show.

Change more than one thing in a test and still tell which one helped: every combination of your settings, in a shuffled order you can repeat.

What your robot is worth in a match, from your own cycle times and your own manual. Ranks every action by points per second and spends the match on the best ones first.

Whether the risky autonomous is worth more than the safe one once its failure rate is counted, using the interval a small number of runs really supports.

The last moment you can stop scoring and still make the endgame, from your own timed attempts, and whether going is worth the points it costs.

Ranks scouted teams by what they are likely to contribute, and says which gaps between them your data can actually support.

Load an event’s match results and see every team’s record, average alliance score and winning margin. The file stays on your device.