Sensors

should they make any new sensors for vex or the sensors they have enough?
Please tell if you have any ideas.

look in the new product ideas section of this forum, also i think a accelerometer or CMOS camera would be nice

(In order of preference) A [minimum] 150 deg/sec gyro, a 1g dual axis accelerometer, an IR short/long distance sensor, and a temperature sensor would be sweet. I’ve already used all of these with Vex, but “official” (and hence competition legal) sensors would be wicked sweet.

Do you know if its possible to have a compass sensor?
this might be a stupid question i know some other people where talking about gps but that might be to expensive

i know you can get cheap compass sensors that ouput digital signals for each direction, i forget where i saw this but try googleing ‘compass sensors’

okay thanks

When you look at what can be added to the FRC robots, the Vex Robots are “way behind”…

Then again VEX robots are not meant to be FRC robots…

I’m curious about what sensors can be added to FRC robots that make Vex “way behind”.

I’ve yet to find a sensor that’s FRC-compatible but not Vex-compatible. (Though some, like the gear tooth encoders from the FRC KoP need a 12v DC power supply, which is easily procurable by using eight AA batteries in series.)

yes i agree, sometimes it takes a little trial and error and some extra circuitry at the side

if your all about looks and dont want wires everywhere then encase it in a plastic box, and put LED’s or something on it

I should clarify that statement by saying that Vex is a “long ways behind” in FTC ( FVC ) legal parts… The Vex Micro controller is identical to the FRC 2004-2005 controller in the Microprocessor, it just doesn’t have as many inputs/outputs.

I believe some new sensors would be nice, but i think the sensors that vex has now could be improved upon.

i agree, ive heard the ultrasonic distance sensor is slow and everything else has to stop when its scanning (at least you wont hit an object while its still standing), the limit switch could be built at a different angle (i was making a distance measurer that worked like a trundle wheel and to put the limit switch over the axle was extremely difficult)

they are improving the optical encoder though

for Hangin Around we had 2 ben a limit switch so it would fit into the space that we needed it to fit into. so you can bend the small arm on the switch.

Limit Switch arms are designed to be bent and modified such that they can be mounted and triggered in unique ways.

That is exactly the right way to use them.

I think VEX should think about making a potentiometer sensor for shaft angle measurement. Teams could then build their own servo’d mechanism with VEX motors. The sensor should be smaller than the encoder package.
Or how about IR ranging like the Sharp sensors. These should be easily readable by a PIC processor, either in analog or digital (TOF) mode.

It would be possible to rig up a limit switch to do this.

The Vex Optical Encoders can be used to measure angles by scaling the encoder counts to degrees or radians.

I think that some new sensors would be great, but the MUST make them compatible with the original Vex Kit.

We’ve found that the sensors aren’t quite accurate enough to do that, there is a little wiggle in the sensor.