Hi everyone! I hope everyone’s having a good day. As some of you might know, I am part of a team at my school, Team 39232. While I love my team, I would also like to make robots and mechanisms at home using Vex parts. The problem with that is I would have to buy my own Vex parts. Looking at the Vex products website, I doesn’t look like a viable option to buy a kit, as it is way over what I should spend and it doesn’t seem sufficient enough to let me create what I want to create. If I go down this path of buying Vex parts myself, I need a better option, so I will be able to get the parts I need and also not pay a hefty price for them. From what I can tell, Vex keeps their parts very secluded, as you can only buy them through Vex. Any advice?
There’s not much advice to give. Engineering is expensive, especially robotics. If your just playing with them like Legos, maybe VEX IQ is a better option as it is much cheaper, but one way you can save some money is to not buy the kits. Instead, buy the system bundles, some steel c-channel, gears, sprockets, fasteners, and miscellaneous stuff when you need it. Still, you probably will have to spend $1,000+. I want to buy vex parts to build at home too, but unless if your made of money, it’s quite the hurdle🤷
I got the EXP kit, which has a decent amount of parts and is compatible with the V5 parts. The longest c-channel is only 20 holes long, so you may need more parts if you want to make large robots with an EXP kit. It was $750 and has most of the basic parts. It doesn’t have linear slides or some of the more advanced parts though.
If you think education is expensive… the alternative is even more expensive.
Take good care of your stuff, you can resell for a good price later on.
If you want to understand the fundamentals of mechanisms, design bots, etc… I’d give a good HARD look at a used iq kit. You can learn 90% of what v5/vrc can do with far less money.
If you do buy your own kit, try not to cut up metal in random lengths, cut only on the marks (every 5 holes). You will end up with reusable ‘lego’ style pieces and not a lot of random unusable stuff. Same for axles. Once cut, do NOT recut to shorter lengths… otherwise eventually you end up with a bunch of too short pieces.
Find some buddies, agree on how the kit & parts will be used, and go in together on a kit.
EXP is a pretty good choice as something to test and develop code on when a V5 is not available. As you said, it supports all of the V5 sensors, but what may not be widely known is that it also supports using a V5 controller. The controller can connect directly to the builtin radio with bluetooth or using an external VEXnet radio (pairing is done in the same way as a V5). Competition control is supported so competition functionality can also be tested, however, EXP is not legal for use in competition. We even support brain to brain communication using VEXlink (only with VEXnet radios), an EXP can communicate with another EXP brain or a V5 brain.
I’ve seen people sell used parts for a lot cheaper and that could be a possible option. I can’t remember where but people might sell them on the forum . I understand how parts are very expensive and i dont have the best ideas but I hope I was able to help in some way.
Thank you, everyone, for all the advice. I’ll make sure to look at ebay and try to find used parts. If I end up buying new, I might go with the EXP parts.