I want IR sensors. Sharp makes three different types (ranges) that would be useful in a VEX robot. I want them, or one of them. Robodyssey makes a nice mounting bracketed, mark it up 100% and ship to me.
I want flex sensors. It tells how much it’s bending, ideal for figuring out how many sacks you have.
I want line sensors that can see the line, not need to be close enough to the line to smell the tape. The current set of 3 would need to improve to be considered pathetic.
I want analog sonars that I can off board most of the hard work to the sensor so I just read the value. Pulse and interrupts are cool if I can get to the bare metal. Not the current case. I don’t want to get involved with RobotC and it’s (their) wild attempts to be smarter than me.
I want a light source and light sensor that I have some chance of putting a color filter in front of and have it work 90% of the time.
I didn’t want a speaker. Karthik has already come out against speakers playing “mindless little tunes” (my wording not his). I could get behind a MP3 player with 100 10 second fragments that say "VEX rocks’, “Move or be moved”, “JVN says iterate or die” and so on. Send it a address string and it blurts phrases out.
I want flashy demo lights. LED strings are cheap, we can use them to wow the crowd but know that blue flash means they have the bags, yellow flash the goal is in sight, white flash is GOAL SCORED! On robot status from 12’ away.
So I want go be able to buy electronics from SPARKFUN or Adafruit and have it be legal. Or have VEX be a SPARKFUN or Adafruit wholesaler and mark it up and send it to me.
Sensors on robots are the most important part. If they can’s sense they can’t move. Can’t move with a purpose, why move at all.
Obviously this is something we all want, but what about the money? The VEX LEDs are MORE THAN A DOLLAR EACH. I’d love this stuff, but from the prices of everything else, these things would cost me a semester’s worth of tuition. Anyway, you can still use whatever sensors you want on a college team.
I think you are asking for too much. The sensors that are available work very well if you can program them well. Asking for a sensor that tells you how many sacks you have would be a weight sensor and I do not see much of a use for it since there is no real time feedback to the controllers. You also want strings of LEDs that say “score” and so on. These would not be legal even if VEX decided to make them because they can cause a distraction. I have played against robots with glove lights attached all around them and it is very distracting. Also about your issues with EasyC, Intelitek and RobotC, I do not know what your software is doing to you but everyone that I have encountered does not have a problem with them and there support group is awesome. They help us constantly with problems that we may have and a majority of the time it is user error. So next time dont take out your anger with the people on the forum. If you really have a problem, take it out with someone that can help you. Not all of us that cant do anything even if we wanted.
I know this is a side-tangent but if you are desperate because you want the students to be exposed to that kind of knowledge and how to utilize it, maybe you should consider FTC since it allows custom sensors and protoboards and such.
Financially FTC is much more expensive than VEX especially just starting up but maybe you can just have one FTC team for the whole club to cut down the cost and have kids whom are interested into things mentioned in your post to be on the team?
I’m not going to start the FTC vs. VEX argument here but it’s certainly an option to expose yourself to a different program to see how it goes.
I’m not entirely sure that there’s much point in putting out a line of advanced sensors. Selling sensors in the Vex pro line might work, or just having access to custom sensors that’ll work with Vex microcontrollers will do for hobbyists. As for high/middle school competition, there’s not a whole lot of point in putting out very advanced sensors.
I figure most high school and middle school teams generally aren’t up to the level where having more advanced sensors will help them. Considering most of the teams at Worlds probably wouldn’t use them effectively, I don’t think schools still using protobot chassis (shudder) would.
At the college level, there might be a greater likelihood of someone actually needing the advanced functionality of more powerful sensors, and they’re the ones that have access to custom electronics anyways.
I have 15 middle school teams and 3 high school teams and I sponsor two college teams (CAKE and KTOR) along with 5 middle school teams that just do the PSU Abington Fire Fight, so yes there is a demand. Think of Aura, Green Eggs and The Jones with advanced sensors and the worlds at the high end is a vastly different place.
I think it would be great if new, higher quality sensors were released (trust me, there have been times where I was half temped to rig up my own) through the VEX system, but it is all based around cost. If you look at the construction of the current sensors, you can tell that they aren’t exactly built for quality. Then again, I have seen some rather impressive robots that didn’t need precision sensors.
Either way, the idea of new sensors is great. Let’s hope someone in VEX product design jumps on the bandwagon.
