My school has a few cool ideas for what to do with some of our older V2(?) cortexes but many need lots of motors. My question then is if there is a way to bind and run multiple cortexes off of a single controller and how many motors can the cortex handle at once before they lose power?
You can only sync up one vortex to a controller because you can only put one vexnet key into the controller. I would keep the maximum motors at 12 but you should be able to go higher. With, 12 motors, you are already using all ports and 2 y splitter cables. All of the other 3 prong ports are for sensors
My thought was that the controller would only be bound to one frequency that both cortexes would recognize, but that’s definitely not something I’d know enough about
Conveniently, work has already been done, by none other than jpearman, to communicate between 2 Cortexes over UART:
This is the V2 cortex.
Before there is any further confusion about the name, see this post:
TL;DR: There is no such thing as “V2” or “V4.” It is just the Cortex, which is part of the Cortex control system.
And the PIC brain would be V0.5!
I did what James did with the PIC connecting via serial ports. I also used a pretty simple protocol between the PIC controllers. Each side could act as a master/slave both sending commands / receiving data. The joysticks were connected to PIC 1, and the program there could send motor actions to PIC2 based on their position. Likewise PIC2 could query the joystick positions and do motor actions based on that.
The command loop could get a little wonky with multiple sonar sensors running since they are interrupt driven. Baud rate was 2400, back of the envelope calcs showed that 240 characters per second was more than enough info back and forth.
Good luck on your project.
But the V5 is also the cortex, it uses a cortex microcontroller, some people refer to the “Cortex”(V4) as the legacy kits.
The big reason to not call V5 a “Cortex” despite using cortex chips is that “Cortex” appeared in the name for the previous generation of EDR control hardware and it does not appear in the name for the V5 control hardware. So while the V5 Brain is a device that uses Cortex processors, it’s not the VEX Cortex.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve reached semantic satiation on the word “cortex” and need to go cool off my cerebral cortex.
it’s mentioned for the V4 control system as the Vex arm based cortex microcontroller system. For the V5 it’s known as the V5 robot brain, but just because it’s not specifically mentionned in the name does not mean that it cannot be mistaken. Many teams still refer to the V5 brain as the Cortex, which is not wrong, but I understand can be misleading
In order to bind multiple vortexes together, you must perform the Rite of Binding.
First you link all the cortexes together with wire and arrange them in a circle. Then dance around the circle chanting:
Thy supreme overlord DRow and the almighty vex gods
He who created the mighty chainbar
Then you throw a welder into the circle, and there should be a flash of light and all the cortexes should be bound.
Note: It was never called V4, it was only called Cortex. The full order is:
PIC Control System → Cortex Control System → V5 Control System
I think it would be a lot more fun to communicate through a motor and quad-encoder. A motor from one cortex connects directly to a quad-encoder which is connected to the other brain. Also probably want communication the other way too.
That sounds like one of those robots that holds the controller for itself
Wait, if we did this in tournament…could we use multiple vortexes:/
Edit: this was a joke its probably not legal
No need to spend a valuable motor for this - have an LED on one of the brains shine into light sensor on another brain.
Ah, a true intellectual I see. Until the red from someone’s phone screen hits the light sensor and then your bot starts flipping out and break dancing.
It not a bug it’s a feature.
Please check the game manual before asking rules clarification questions.
Notable, in this case, is <R15>.
Why do y’all keep calling them vortexes