Vex recently released these, a lovely new replacement for the vexnet keys. It seems that salvation has arrived and I can finally get rid of my bag of replacement keys and throw out my pile of dead ones. However, I haven’t used one and I’d like to know…
Has anyone used one of these yet? Do they drop more/less than usual? How is their performance in staying in the cortex/joystick? etc…
I know that it’s just pre-order right now, but I was wondering if anybody had their hands on one. Once they are shipped, I was wondering if their effectiveness could be discussed more widely.
My dad ordered a set for us, but we have not gotten our hands on them. We have been to a couple of venues that are notorious for WiFi interference causing drop outs so maybe we can have a chance to use them there. We have been very fortunate with the original key’s, we have dropped our remote several times and never had a failure due to breakage.
I don’t see the new key’s as staying in any better, I think that is a wear problem and not a key problem. We use a USB extension for the sole purpose of saving wear to the cortex USB port and try to minimize the key being taken out of the remote.
I know for both my personal self and the team I’m working with I won’t be purchasing the new keys until they have wireless debugging and I see them work out all the issues on it. I’m a bit skeptical of these keys.
^Ditto on the connection tab issue. I really just want a revamped Cortex fixing that, but I digress.
We are not trading our key’s, just getting the new ones. We will use our old key’s for programming and debugging and the new keys for competitions. The only issues we have had with the old ones is drop-outs in 2 venues we attend each year.
The real test will come in April when there’s a mixture of new and old keys used in very large quantities in the same environment along with hundreds of other devices using bluetooth and WiFi at the same time.
I loaded master firmware V4.0 onto one cortex and joystick and so far see no issues with the existing keys. I’m going to wait for the exchange program before purchasing new ones, I’m obviously curious to test these ASAP but they are not exactly an impulse buy at $40 each.
I’m going to leave the team on VEXnet 1.0 until next season as it is a relatively proven technology and we have very few disconnects at competitions despite having occasional issue at the school.
Our new keys are coming this Friday, so we will get to test them in a week. I’ll keep you all posted on how well it works. 
Since we have some broken keys and there are not older replacements, we are forcing these into the club as soon as we can. I guess that’s what you get when you don’t treat your Vexnet keys nicely!
So everyone out there, don’t leave your keys in the joystick and let them bang about in the toolbox or on the robot during transport. And make sure they are in a protected position on the robot protecting them from in-game abuse.