Legality of Led Lights

[CapitalF]

My team recently got to states and we were planning to decorate our robot, i was wondering if LED lights would be considered non vex lights

[99976D]

It depends on what lights you use. If they serve as a part that holds a certain thing in, then it would be illegal. If you were to check the manual, then you’ll see with decorations. Find it out there depending what you want to do for them.

[Mavric]

R8:

g. 1. Decorations which provide visual feedback to Drive Team Members (e.g., decorative lighting) are permitted, provided that they do not violate any other rules and serve no other function (e.g., structural support).

The lights can’t be controlled by a dedicated LED controller. For this reason, you have to use lights that can be driven by the brain itself.

R11:

Robots have one microcontroller. Robots must ONLY use one (1) VEX V5 Robot Brain (276-4810). Any other microcontrollers or processing devices are not allowed, even as non-functional decorations.

This is if you want to use addressable lights. Lights that just need power are easy as you can have a battery box with a switch.

R8:

e. Internal power sources (e.g., for a small blinking light) are permitted, provided that no other rules are violated and this source only provides power to the non-functional decoration (i.e., does not directly or indirectly influence any functional portions of the Robot).

If you want to go with addressable lights you should go with WS2812B lights as there are already Vexcode and pros libraries made for them.

This is the exact listing I brought and they worked very well with Sylib.
(They are out of the 144 per meter strips that I got but there are plenty more listings on Aliexpress)
WS2811 WS2812B WS2813 WS2815 5050 RGB Smart LED Strip Individually Addressable IC 30/60/144Pixels/Leds/m Tape Light IP30/65/67 (aliexpress.com)

Don’t go over the top with lights as more than 2 strips could drain your battery pretty fast.
Also, the max length supported by the brain is 60 LED’s so you will have to cut them.

Lastly, you will have to connect them to 3-wire ports so this means finding an ADI device to sacrifice or finding a non-vex device with the same connecter.
(The connector is called “Futaba”)

Hope this helps.