New Products - July 2021

[DRow]

A new product has just been added to the VEX Robotics Website.

Announcing the Potentiometer V2 (2-Pack)!

The original Potentiometer (276-2216) measures up 250°, while the new Potentiometer v2 can measure up to 333°, and can be mounted directly under V5 Motors.

It’s important to note that VEXcode currently only supports a 250 degree setting for the v1 potentiometer. The next update to VEXcode later this month will include an option to choose either the 250° v1 or 333° v2 potentiometer. However, support for proportional reading is available now.

The Potentiometer V2 is now in stock at our U.S. warehouse, and should be available internationally in the next few weeks.

[Xenon27]

the biggest question is, will it break if you accidentally turn it past its limits, or are there hard stops?

[Art_Dutra_IV]

There are no hard stops. Nothing breaks if you spin a full rotation, you just don’t get any sensor values in the 27 degree dead band zone.

[Xenon27]

@Art_Dutra_IV

There are no hard stops. Nothing breaks if you spin a full rotation, you just don’t get any sensor values in the 27 degree dead band zone.

ah ok that’s good then. I’ve killed many of the old potentiometers by turning them too far, so it’s nice to hear that won’t happen with these guys.

[alex531]

Does that mean you can turn it more than 1 rotation and it should still function? eg. if its at 20 degrees and you make a full rotation, will it just read 20 degrees again?

[lacsap]

@Art_Dutra_IV

There are no hard stops. Nothing breaks if you spin a full rotation, you just don’t get any sensor values in the 27 degree dead band zone.

thanks for engineering a solid solution - the old potentiometers were a mystery to most novice teams, who inadvertently broke past the limits of the sensor…

Hopefully, software support will remind novice users that these devices have dead band zone - is there a way to flag this zone in software?

[kmmohn]

Yes, that is correct. Potentiometers are “absolute” for position. Also handy that you can power-off/power-on and don’t necessarily need to calibrate.

[LuxembourgIsACountry]

Does not calibrating mean you can’t set where you want 0 degrees to be? Or is there still an option to calibrate?

[lacsap]

you can do that on your own in software …

Just be aware there is a dead band zone of no useful data.

Long way to say, that is usually left as an exercise for the reader Serious, it might be something available through VEXcode …

[jpearman]

@lacsap

Long way to say, that is usually left as an exercise for the reader Serious, it might be something available through VEXcode …

Nope, it’s just a pot and will behave the same way as the old pot, the only difference is when asking for the value in degrees or revolutions, it’s calibrated for the new range.

[Calvin_Thrasher]

Wait pots have dead zones. How did I never know this

[lacsap]

Time to take one apart and see what is inside:

here is forum post:

Potentiometer repair

So this is technically illegal for a competition robot, however, not everyone builds competition robots so it’s worth knowing. The school has some potentiometers that don’t work well anymore primarily due to inadvertent continuous rotation. I also had one that was bad straight out of the box, it gave an incorrect reading part way through the range. Although they are not expensive, it’s cheaper to repair them. The hard part of this process is opening the potentiometer enclosure, I used a smal…