@EvolvingJon
A few points. The LCD on the VEXIQ is very nice for picking multiple programs, etc. but it’s pretty worthless once the robot gets more than 4’ away (with the robot on the ground and me standing up, that’s about 4’). I find that I use the RGB lights more as driver display on the little guys. They are a good design, they can be seen in a brighter room.
@lpieroni
I agree, I like the two part devices. Most of the time the motor does not need an IME on it and the extra cable management is a pain. This is the other advantage the IQ has, the IME cable is part of the single control cable to the motor/brain. I’ve had very little motor damage on IQ, more than I’d like on EDR. So I’d like to keep them separate. You can also use the IME attach process as a teaching moment, “Hey look at all those small, breakable gears inside here, maybe some engineering on our design rather than brute force would be good.”
@EvolvingJon
Damaged motors – Take the “dead” motors and Frankenstein them back to life to make new working versions. While they are apart a quick swipe with a paint pencil or even spray paint on the outer covers will mark them not for competition. But they will be fine for practice builds, new classes, etc.
As far as $5 Pi’s go, again it’s a matter of scale and what they are. The Pi Zero is a just a circuit board that has sold over 200,000 units already and is planned to sell about 50,000 per month (from RaspPi site). As the volume goes up the cost can go down. Lots and lots of engineering upfront that needs to be paid down during the product life. VEX does not have anywhere near that volume. If they did have that volume we would be up to our elbows in competition teams and a massive stream of roboteers coming out of the schools. While VEX isn’t small quantities, they are not selling millions of controllers or Cortex devices.
You mentioned Bluetooth and WiFi support. All I’ve heard is having the ability to plug the VEXnet dongle into my laptop and have driver software I could call and run the robot from either a controller or the PC. But to be honest you can do that today with two cheap serial transceivers plugged into the serial ports. I did it back in the Pic days with two XBee chips.
Not sure about what “upping the game” wants to imply. I think if you were to head into a small shop and ask them about their supply chain you will find an interesting story. Or reach out to a Kickstarter, you’ll find lots of stories about founders working for pennies an hour. Not viable for a long term company effort.
The good news is we are only 6 weeks away from the famous JVN new product presentation at Worlds. Maybe they have some hot announcements. We’ve asked for lots of items, lets see what we get.