Fresh from the pit

The VexGrind Blog

Deep dives, build breakdowns, and strategy guides written by teams that compete. No fluff — just what actually wins matches.

Latest posts
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VEX NAME REVEAL!!

The official VEX Robotics game names for the 2026-2027 season were recently revealed in a retro-style announcement a few days ago. Click here to find out more!

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Experimenting with obstacle courses

A few days ago, we made an obstacle course using household objects to test our driving skills and who would go through for our starting two in the challenges in the future.

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Conventional and Unconventional Robots

>Conventional: these robots often fit the stereotypes that a "robot" carries. One (popular) example of unconventional robots is the branch of "soft robots". They utilise compliant materials, contrary to their conventional counterparts, and employ links that have a similar structure: soft, malleable and high-tech!

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Alliance Selection Psychology: How to Get Picked Every Time

Rankings don't always predict picks. Here's the meta-game of alliance selection — what top teams look for and how to market yourself.

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We Scored 35/40 on Our Engineering Notebook. Here's Our Template

Breaking down the design decision format, team meeting logs, and section ordering that helped us nearly ace our notebook at Worlds.

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Odometry in 48 Hours: A Beginner's Survival Guide

When our qualifier was 2 days away and we had zero odometry code, we pulled this off. Annotated code, diagrams, and all the gotchas included.

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Catapult vs Flywheel in High Stakes: A Data-Driven Breakdown

We built both and tested them back-to-back over 200 shots. Here are the shot consistency numbers, build complexity scores, and our final verdict.

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Vision Sensor Targeting: A Working Auto-Aim Implementation

Full code walkthrough of our vision-sensor-based goal tracking system. Covers PID control loop, latency compensation, and field calibration.

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Match Scouting 101: The Sheet We Use at Every Tournament

Our printable scouting sheet + digital spreadsheet for tracking opponent tendencies, auto consistency, and driver control strength across a full event.