Had a chance to stop by the Vex booth at CES and see the V5. Really well thought out and looks to be a lot of fun to work with. The motor cartridges are really nice and the thought going into expansion is thorough. Certainly going to be worth the upgrade.
Did you get the chance to hold the controller? I have my doubts about the joystick placement. I feel like no video game consoles have that layout for a reason.
I am not a fan of the controller also, is the battery as bulky as seen in the picture?
I liked the controller. Has a nice weight to it and some great features.
We might not really know how it feels till we get our gear.
Did it feel strange using the joysticks? They just seem a bit high, especially for smaller hands.
Holy crap, that looks better in person!
I really like that V5 Battery, and it looks like it can last a very long time without getting damaged, as well as I love the way the controller is built. Probably, as what I can see, VEX is trying to transition us from having a second battery to just one, which, in my opinion, would be really nice and more space efficient. Although many have complaints about the controller, personally I think it will be much more comfortable to the hand, as well as looks like it’s built to easily switch between the joystick and the buttons. (EDIT//: Also, a great amount of drones’ controllers have that layout, and it’s really comfortable) The sensors look like they can be easily opened for faster replacements, as well as I like the idea of interchangeable cartridges on the motors to change RPM’s. I can’t wait for release, and I especially can’t wait for the vision sensor to come out too 
Looks real nice. Joystick kinda looks like the wiiu pro controller. I wonder if it feels similar to that.
Do you have any idea what the power connector on the battery is? I hate the old tamiya.
The coolest stuff is some of the status windows that pop up on the controller and the brain. Really, this thing makes everybody’s life easier with a lot less guessing. It addresses lots of shortcomings of the present system and should bring more consistency to programming and operation.
There are a lot of little design features, even in the new claw, that give teams a lot of control.
How do the 3 pin sensors plug in?
@TriDragon – did you see how the vision sensor mounts? Is it just from the back?
The V5 site has 3D models you can click on and spin around to see the parts from all angles.
Legacy sensor ports are on the V5 at the opposite end to the battery connector.
vision sensor has mounting points on the back.
I want to say yes, just the back, but not 100% sure.
There is a set of 8x ports on the side for the old 3-pin connectors.
Paul took a motor pretty far apart, really nice design. Definitely buy an extra one and gearbox so you can do a teardown with students, good info in the design.
Only thing on my wish list I didn’t see was where the screws for the motor are. Will still need to zip tie for fast change out to leave the base on the robot frame, but with these motors you will probably only be doing that in the early design phase because they should outlast the old ones by a bunch.
@jpearman @TriDragon thanks for the quick response.
One of the things I use now for other Cortex projects is the serial port. Is that part of V5?
Eh, it’s not too bad; the IQ controller is laid out like that and I didn’t even notice the joystick difference when driving when we switched to EDR.
There are no dedicated TTL level serial ports, there is also no dedicated I2C port. There have been discussions about how this functionality may be achieved in the future, but that’s in the future so may never happen. The USB port is more flexible than that on the cortex, it is not shared by VEXnet keys or anything so is always available for connection to a host system. It implements a composite device and presents itself as two CDC serial ports, one channel is dedicated to programming etc. the other is available for use by user code. So you could certainly connect to something like a RasPi and have simple communications available.