The answer, as us so often the case, is "it depends". Nobody has used the EV-3 kit as yet, so you'll not get any insights beyond the press releases, but here are a couple thoughts

The EV-3 kit ships 8/1, so you'll have precious little time to work with it before the challenge is released - if you think your team members can come up to speed that fast it may be moot

You only have one kit at the moment - if anything breaks (we just lost a controller to the dreaded no screen bug in the NXT, but we have four and two months to get this one fixed), yourout of luck until you can fix it or replace that part.

Again, you only have one kit - many teams make a back up robot in case the one goes out at a tournament (I had a hand-off error in the parking lot the morning of a tournament so that one of the boxes hit the pavement and scattered its contents - it wasn't the robot, so I refrained from killing anyone, but if it had been, a backup would have been the only way to proceed).

I like the promised performance enhancements, the motor improvements, variety, and quantity (the EV-3 can control 4 motors), the additional sensors, the prospect of an easier to incorporate ball wheel, and the updates to the programming interface, but for your situation, I'd rank the redundancy you get from two identical kits pretty highly.

It all depends on where you draw the trade-off line

Brian

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 3, 2013, at 9:25 PM, Jeff Lavezzo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> My team's sponsors are offering to buy us an additional robot this year.  It'll be our second year as a team and this would be our second robot.   We have to choose between getting a second NXT2 or getting the new EV3.  The pros of getting the NXT2 is that we'd then have to of the same kits that we could use in parallel and interchangeably. The pros of getting the EV3 is getting the latest and greatest and setting us up for future work.
> 
> Can anyone with more experience in FLL than we have come up with a good reason to go either way?  Is it really that great a benefit to have two robots to work with?  Is the EV3 so much better?
> 
> One other point to consider: our team is pretty much 13 and up so probably winding down our time as an FLL team, but  our equipment will probably be passed to a younger team at some point.
> 
> Thanks for any advice
> 
> Jeff Lavezzo
> Charlottesville
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