The V5 3-Wire Expander is now available for purchase from the VEX Robotics Website. Plug it into any smart port to add an additional (8) 3-Wire ports to your V5 Robot Brain.
As per usual, it is only available for purchase on the US Store for now. It will be available on our international stores in the coming weeks as our other warehouses receive stock.
Really needed this for a robot next week, buying now. Thanks so much for posting!
At last, with my 8 motor pushbot, I can finally have 96 line trackers!
HOLY MOLY!!! IT’S $40 PER UNIT!!! That’s more expensive than any of the sensors! Wow, VEX!
You pay more for the research and development than the materials inside it
it is a bit pricey, but about as expensive as you’d expect a piece of v5 hardware. And you really should only need one, so I think its reasonable.
What do you mean the I’m planing on using 12 of them so I can have a 360 camera from vision sensors. Also I’m planning on have 2 backup encoders for each wheel encoder so I have a very low chance to not know where I am. Then the rest I’m going to have line sensors drop on the field so I can sense when a ball or robot goes past a certain point.
As per @Xenon27’s post in Dankest Vex Memes, I dont think the vision sensor is very reliable for that usage.
If your goal is driver control field position tracking, 3 tracking wheels and a few laser range finders (when they come out) will do a much better job.
Think there need to be some fairness in this… “allocation”.
REC just released the VRC Annotated Programming Skills Challenge with worlds spots to be won.
And the deadline is 30 Aug… and nowadays, terms like “in the coming weeks” just do not inspire confidence at all.
So i guess it will be another case of non-US teams not able to get our hands on this useful product in time for the online challenge? And we are supposed to showcase how we are using the different types of sensors…
Wow, that’s just…sad. I think lots of U.S. teams don’t realize how much VEX’s headquarters being in the U.S. benefit them.
That said, hopefully the deadline for the challenge will be extended. I, for one, do not have a field at my house, and I’m sure not going to my club before August 30. 
I always thought the aug 30 deadline seemed weird. completely cuts off any school-only teams from participating tbh, as well as teams who won’t have access to a field until the fall.
Hopefully the challenge is either extended or is ran again at a later date. I’m interested to see how entries there actually are.
A lot of the online challenges are rolling things. One ends and another will pop up to take its place. At least, that is what we were told at the EP Summit.
Question: how would you be able to program any of the sensors through the 3 wire Expander? It’s only using one port on the v5 brain and there are no markings for the different 3 wire ports.
Or am I missing something?
In the new version of VexCode (both V5 and Pro), you can add the 3 wire expander as a smart device. Then, when you go to add a 3 wire device, it will allow you to select whether you are connecting it to the 3 wire ports on the brain or on the expander.
@sazrocks explained practically how to do it. I think what your struggling with is how 1 port can become 8. The answer is that “smart devices” have a little computer inside them, when you talk to a smart device you are not reading a raw sensor etc. The smart device expander handles reading all 8 ports and putting the data together to send to the brain.
Under the hood the 8 ADI ports actually run into a chip and then are treated as a smart port(port 22). The new part is just taking that chip and selling it separately.
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