Now a days we have many middle school teams building 6 motors drivetrain. When they try to drive them, they could not find a way to configure the 6-Motors drive. The VEXCode V5 only give choices of 2-Motors and 4-Motors drive selections.
I know high school teams can use text-based V5 Pro or Visual Studio VEX Robotics extension. But for Middle schoolers who are just upgraded from IQ to VRC, Pro and VS VEX extension are too hard. It will be great if VEXCode V5 in general can make 6-Motors drive as a standard option.
You don’t need to use Pro or the VS Code extension, but you will need to use C++ or Python in VEXcode to use the drivetrain classes with more than 4 motors.
You are able to classify the motors individually so that they can be programmed to still act as though they are paired. Here is an example of a 4-motor drivetrain paired individually:
Thank you Payne. we can do that. I kind of thinking if VEXCode can support adding 6-Motor drivetrain in Devices, we can take advantage on internal PID and calibrating Inertial sensor.
That way the auto code can be easier and more accurate.
Whether a 6 motor drive would ever be added to VEXcode is a question for @tfriez .
However, as more motors are involved in a drivetrain, the potential for its configuration not matching the somewhat generic approach that the VEXcode graphical configuration presents increases. The current four motor drivetrain assumes both left (or right) motors need to turn the same direction, there is no allowance for one of the two being reversed or having different gearing. An additional two motors just adds to the possibility that this approach would not match what has been built. I think that beyond the simple two and four motor drivetrains, a six motor drive falls into the category of advanced drives along with X drive, H drive, use of mecanum wheels etc.
This is highly unlikely due to the complexity indicated above with swapping individual motors directions and different gearing. It would be difficult to handle every permutation elegantly and ensure it works correctly in ever use case.
One thing we could explore is adding a 3rd motor to the “motor group” device, then you could have your left / right side drive configurations handled there as at least one logical “motor group”. This gives you the flexibility of reversing individual motors as needed within the group.
I run middle school teams striclty on VS Code Ext and use to be VEX Code Pro V5, we switched to the EXT cause I wanted to teach python since its simple on a single sheet of program, vs C++ on multiple pages, but VEX Code Pro V5 is just as simple as VEX Code, just without the drag and drop feature.
Instead of dealing with prebuilt things, start teaching them how to make their own, great they got the ideas from VEX IQ, but real programming is gonna be text, and it should start in middle school honestly.
Here is a good video on how to code a 6-motor drivetrain. This might be an old version of Vexcode v5, but you can implement most of it into what it is today.
(Starts at 4:16)
