Is it possible to overclock a vex cortex? I was just wondering…
(I have too much free time)
hmm…
You could open up the cortex and try to change out some of the ICs in it (good luck figuring it out, lest actually doing it).
If you were really bored you could try to power it with more than 7.2 volts but you would probably be left with a smoking/flaming Cortex so don’t do that lol
I mean you almost never power with 7.2V. Even in just normal usage they will see almost 9V. If you do try go to give more they handle it decently well. I have seen them take 11V.
Really the question is what you want from the cortex, are you trying to get more compute power by “overclocking” or are you just hoping to run big motors with a lot of power.
The battlebots team Bronco actually uses a vex cortex
They just take the standard PWM output from the cortex and send it to a beefier motor controller.
I was sort of thinking about both, but the using more voltage seems like it might be worth a try.
The main processor is almost certainly protected behind voltage regulation circuitry though. Just feeding more voltage through the normal battery connections probably won’t accomplish anything.
That’s true
A higher voltage would do nothing apart from increase the voltage at the motor supply rails.
You’d probably need to change the crystals on the processors.
Still, it would result in stronger motors
Nifty
I was thinking, how cool would it be to go around and say, “my robot is overclocked!”
Um, okay…
Well anyway, I was thinking, what if you powered a robot with an Arduino, or a raspberry pi or a micro controller of some sort that could be overclocked, cuz why not…
I agree, please stop
I’ve deleted a few posts for being pointless.
This teardown may help you.
http://www.techspin.info/archives/856
It looks the Cortex and SYSCLK clock speed is controlled by PLLMUL. That will probably change the timing of all peripherals as the Clock Tree diagram shows them scaled off of SYSCLK.