I’m starting a team with a company and some other FRC mentors and I wanted to know if it is a good idea to buy the current Micro’s to start of or just wait a bit more till the new Micro’s are released.
I’m talking about High School so…If there is an estimated/expected date for the release of them and it’s before July please inform me. We are looking forward to buy everything in June so we start in July.
I’ve been told that the Cortex will be available to teams sometime during and after the 2009-10 World Championship. I would recommend you wait until then assuming you intend to compete during the 2010-11 season.
Good luck and welcome to VRC.
Cody Smith,
Polynomic3D.com
Thank you very much 
We were also planning to buy the Classroom Bundle (4 actually) and we’re a little confused due to the fact that the Cortex might not be the official one sold and therefore not included in the bundle…
They will most likely redo the Bundles after the Cortex ships, since not all teams need the power of the Cortex…
I can’t speculate on the inclusion of the Cortex controllers into new product bundles, but I can say that there are no current plans to discontinue the current VEX controller. It is a good, solid lower-cost product that will meet the needs of most educators and competition teams for a while yet. This may change in the future, but for now the product line will have three controllers: the current PIC Microcontroller v0.5, the Cortex, and the pending ARM9 Microcontroller.
The current bundles on the Website will include the PIC V0.5 controllers.
That is what I said, but not nearly as eloquently…
Rick is very correct, the V.5 microcontroller is a great robotics microcontroller / programming platform. Trust me, unless your doing floating-point mathematics or happen to need input from a lot of quad. encoders, the V.5 will do fine.
I guess my point is this, V.5 is great for engineering programs and in the classroom. I would guess that Vex keeps that microcontroller in the classroom lab kits for this very reason.
-Cody