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.

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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.

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Drivetrain

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

Lifts & Arms

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.

Lifts & Arms

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

Lifts & Arms

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.

Lifts & Arms

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.

Lifts & Arms

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

Lifts & Arms

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

Lifts & Arms

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.

Lifts & Arms

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

Lifts & Arms

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

Intakes & Shooters

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.

Intakes & Shooters

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.

Intakes & Shooters

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.

Intakes & Shooters

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.

Intakes & Shooters

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

Intakes & Shooters

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

Intakes & Shooters

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

Intakes & Shooters

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

Pneumatics

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

Pneumatics

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

Pneumatics

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

Pneumatics

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.

Pneumatics

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.

Pneumatics

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

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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.

Autonomous

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.

Autonomous

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

Autonomous

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

Whole Robot

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

Whole 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.

Whole Robot

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

Whole Robot

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

Whole Robot

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.

Strategy

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.

Strategy

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.

Strategy

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

Strategy