Are you new to vex or something? why would vex ever release something with a reasonable price xD
That $.50 per cortex vex saved by using a cortex-m3 instead of a more powerful maybe even multi core processor is what keeps food on Karthik’s plate, you wouldnt want him to starve would you
Having spent some money on Arduino stuff which you think is cheap at first, but by the time you get 8 h-bridges and figure out how to power the motors, it gets more expensive than you want.
The Cortex has two processors doesn’t it? So that would be $10
If you introduce a new Cortex then you have a massive replacement/upgrade cycle that costs a ton. I could see making a more powerful processor or adding some more memory to the current design to keep the game similar for a while as you phase in a new Cortex.
The current Cortex ARM processors have to be getting pretty darn cheap these days maximizing the profit on the existing design. Nice profitable success story! Time to order the Brembo brake upgrade on the Porsche eh?
It’d be nice to have faster processors, but the wait1msec(20); is still in there between motor PWM signals… So what do you do with the other 19.99ms now? Digital sensors and I2C communication won’t update very much below 1ms will they? I think the Cortexes processing wise is a nice capability set.
But memory - absolutely! Then 5% of the Vex population that would use it for recording their autonomous or making a true field map of data. Or maybe play a longer tune on the unusually quiet Vex speaker.
this doesn’t have to be an issue, if you choose a processor with a good MMU you can safely put user and control code on the same chip, though this might limit some freedoms you get with having them separate because you are forced to run under whatever RTOS the vex master firmware uses
I still find it hard to believe that the cheapest USB I can find easily has greater than 1000 times greater storage then the cortex… But an entire new cortex would take a long and expensive project so maybe some add ons would be better…
This year we are running into this problem left and right. I wish the cortex had more ports for sure. The last sensor is also super hard to plug in. It took me 10 min the first time!
We often use up all the digital sensor ports. We don’t like to rely to heavily on integrated encoders, we will use 2, but more than that seems to always lead to problems. Therefore, by the time we put 2 or 3 quad encoders, a couple sonars, some LED’s for indicators, limit swithes…it’s full. Not to mention the port 4&10 interrupt problem that messes with the layout of our wiring each year.
