This happened to us this week in the final championship round in final 20 seconds as we were making our last move to win it all and the robot disconnected. This is not about money but all the time and heart we put into this project. There should at least be a rematch if the brain-robot disconnects without any contact.
It just sucks when you know you can win and then one of your wires get shot and your ports fry⌠3 times in one day. The V5 System is nice but nothing is perfect in life. But i do agree with how annoying it is about the technical issue causes teams to loose. V5 is good in my opinion since its simpler but if something like that happens, there should be: restart if serious, that team can take their robot off the field and fix real quick, or use BO3 in that match. BO3 would make sense since if a team gets dc, they have 2 more chances to win. Last year was terrible for us about the V5 system but this year we have been sort of lucky. And to order new ones are very expensive which makes sense for the product but if you need to keep on replacing then you are just throwing money away.
@jpearman please hear all of us out.
EDIT- I changed the @ since i was wrong sorry
Um excuse me who flagged my post. I was clearly stating i had it with vex too. It was not inappropriate.
I live in south, itâs quite humid here most of the time and I have very few static issues. But we go through motors like potato chips.
To those who think whitescreens are due to low battery, I think they are more due to static discharge. My whitescreen took place during a match where I had almost 100 percent battery capacity. The moment I whitescreened was when I was mildly bumped by one of the robots on the opposing alliance, sandwiching me between the field perimeter and their robot, likely causing a static discharge affecting my V5 brain. Perhaps I should invest into more rubber links to mount my V5 brain on or dryer sheets to wipe down my robot with before matches?
or not ESD but micro power disconnect. This is consistent with situations we saw early last season and went away when we backed the brain with foam as a shock absorber.
How would you do that? I personally mount my brain using the metal screw inserts in the back, would switching to the plastic mounting hardware with foam be better?
Many of our competition failures have been due to vex product faults. That is the most disappointing way to lose. We have disconnected multiple time in auton, making us either fail to score, or even push cubes across the line. It is disappointing to have robots break, stacks fall over, or other human-based problems to occur, but the most frustrating possible way to lose is because the brain just wouldnât work, or the motors to shut down. If the VRC expects us to deal with these failures then they need to at least change the re-match rules to help teams whose robotsâ electronics fail outside of their control.
Yeah btw it says no where in rule book cube cant go over. Ive never heard of that til state competition. Every other comp i went to they said bot cant cross
It shouldnât be a product. It has so many issues. The MicroUSB port is a micro usb port, and they didnât bother to put a shield over it to hold it to the board. 2158K lost a brain to this.
The 4p4c ports, as you mentioned, are not designed to handle what they do. VEX shouldâve used a connector that can handle this. As with the upload port, USB-C, with its high bandwidth and high capacity to carry power, is also a possible solution, though it would need to be modified to include a locking mechanism. Maybe if the ports were well designed, 2158R would have at least 1 working brain. Instead they have 3 unusable ones, including 1 with 18 dead ports.
Batteries are also terrible. Remember the âwhoops if you charge the battery it breaks and you lose $50â thing? Yeah. One of my teamâs batteries had this purple thing stick out of the plastic a little bit the other day. That battery is currently in the safest place we could find for it, a steel box.
There are more issues, but Iâll get to those later.
Part 2:
Next up is the motors. The have so many issues, from seizing, to electronic failures, sounding like a ratchet, fake cooling vents that assist not at all with the overheating issues, encoders that are very imprecise thanks to being at the wrong end of the very slack-y gears, ports dying on the motor end, and to top it off, these motors that die faster than they can arrive. These are beyond inexcusable.
Vision Sensors. Vex vision is a joke at best. The built in vision is excusable for the solution vex provides, if it was possible to write your own vision library or use a superior lib, but you canât, because the 4p4c bandwidth is too low to transmit images to the brain. You have to rely on the sensorâs onboard computer and firmware, and trust that this bad vision software will see what you want it to, and wonât see the wrong thing. Iâve also noticed that the vision sensor has a tendency to leave ports in a less than ideal state.
As for the Inertial Sensor, I havenât had that long enough to be able to say anything about its reliability, but I can say that its very noisy.
As Connor mentioned, there are way too few 3 wire ports, and the 3 wire port expander is basically half life 3 at this point.
V5 was a product that was rushed to market by an incompetent design team eager to take the money of educational institutions, knowing that it was just good enough to make v4 obsolete, V5 is a perfect example of what happens to consumers when you allow monopolization, and Iâm sure this wouldnât be an issue if Vex opened up to allowing control systems from other manufacturers.
Itâs a fairly new rule
Pretty sure it does. You can tap the middle cubes, but are DQed once it crosses fully.
Ok then if 2 of yal r correcting me ig it true
If not BO3 (those were the days!) at least they could implement re-match rule for teams who had product failures.
How exactly would that help? Couldnât the static still go through the long screws and straight into the V5?
Exactly. BO3 would be better since it allows a re run. But it would be used for semis and finals. Maybe quarter finals. But for Qualifications and all that, then just re run the match or dont put a win or loss on the team that has an issue.
Rub dryer sheets on the wheels to stop the static. It works.
Thank you @Got_a_Screw_Loose for telling me this
<SG2> and <SG7> answers have been in Q&A for a while. It has been a point of discussion for a while.
Everything is just so expensive for what it is and how much it breaks. We have lost a lot of money from broken electronics, which are very overpriced. We can barely afford all of the needed motors for our teams with our current budget, and at least one burns out per competition! They bumped the prices to try to get a larger profit. They are a business. That is what they do. However, they cannot portal themselves realistically as an education organization because so many schools and organizations cannot afford their products.