Hi all,
Our team unfortunately did not make worlds. As an off-season project, we are planning to build a t-shirt cannon robot for sporting events. We plan to use a vex base and use a PVC t-shirt cannon that shoots t-shirts by releasing air from an air tank. In order to do this, we are planning to use the V5 to trigger a solenoid valve. Our design looks somewhat like this:
My question is if there is some way to control when the valve receives current using the V5 like a V5 controlled switch or something similar. Our current plan is to use a motor to manually press the switch but we would obviously prefer a more elegant solution.
Use a relay (if the current needs of the solenoid are too high for the brain to handle directly) and use an ADI port set to digital to switch the relay on and off.
I also think the relay is your best bet. Please remember that V5 3-wire ports only provide 5V with 2A of supply current shared among all 8 ports. I would recommend looking for a relay with a 5V coil voltage. You would then need to ensure that the relay contacts can handle the current drawn by your solenoid.
In other words, in your drawing you would replace the ‘switch’ part with the relay contacts, and you would connect the coil of the relay to your three-wire port.
