So I was wondering everyones thoughts on this cause I’m pretty new to programming and I was wondering with the V5 motors having their own sensors in them that count rotations are the potentiometer sensors worth it? Are they better than the V5 motors or do you think the V5 motors would suffice?
The v5 motors have internal encoders so you probably won’t need a potentiometer on top of that. Potentiometers also introduce some friction, glitch or break from time to time, and can be affected slightly by humidity. There might be an argument for a potentiometer in some extreme cases, but I can’t think of any normal situations this year where an internal v5 encoder wouldn’t be enough.
Good luck!
Potentiometers can still be useful in the case where the starting position of your V5 motor isn’t going to be consistent and you don’t have time for the program to index it, but you still need to do things based on position. Something like an arm that could start in different positions, but you need to do position control before you can bump it into an indexing limit switch or something of that sort.
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In addition to what @John TYler correctly points out, you may also have situations where you get a reset for some reason. Potentiometers retain their readings through a reset. This is just the same issue @John TYler pointed out; I’m adding a note that it could happen accidentally at other times.
How would I program one because when I put one in my code no commands pop up besides
vex::pot
and how do I get the value and stuff like that.
Look under “sensing” and scroll down. You’ll see pot.value() and pot.changed() sitting there.
I have found the potentiometer to be one of the most useful sensors I could ever have in VEX. There is so much you can do for a small electronic piece that detects position, yet only using one single analog port. I highly suggest using a potentiometer on your lift and probably anywhere that requires a position that has a limit (Aka an arm or DR4B or, well you get the point). It will save you much more time and it will ensure reliability of the position to be accurate. Potentiometers are incredibly cheap (12.99 for a pack of 2) in VEX, so there should be no reason why you should not get them. So, in my opinion, in this game I would say myself that you should have potentiometers on your robot.
Hopefully this answers your question 
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