We have many micro usb ports damaged and can no longer download via usb cable.
We have wireless v5 robot radios that are not connecting, they will blink and pc shows connecting but then fails.
Is there a specific way to connect the bluetooth for wireless coding? The brain doesn’t show on vex v5 to download code but and they do show in bluetooth devices based on their name but cannot connect.
Separare question, with the smart ports. Are we able to download code via a smartport/usb adapter? Is there such a thing?
Thank you! we have many v5 robot brains that we would love to be able to code.
From my experience, I mostly upload code by connecting the micro-USB cable to the brain or the controller with a V5 robot brain.
Although it is possible to use Bluetooth according to some forum posts, I think that this can only be done on a mobile device used alongside a V5 Radio:
Could you maybe specify the problems that you have with the V5 Radio? All wireless coding options that I know of have to utilize the V5 radio somehow, so fixing this would probably be important.
We have the radio connected via smart wire to the brain.
However, when we open Vex v5 it doesn’t show any options to connect. In the windows bluetooth options- we can see the radio and click on it to connect. At this point, the radio blinks for about 15 seconds- windows says connecting- then it says cannot connect.
So we are not able to connect via windows bluetooth or via the vex v5 software (which doesn’t seem to show a list of possible to devices to connect to at all).
Do we need a controller too? We were coding robots basically every day last year and one day all of the usb ports detached. I’m reading that its not a strong point on the v5 brains and opened a few to find that they are barely connected to the board in the first place.
I’ve heard that using a magnetic usb in place can also be risky. But with the design of that micro usb port there doesn’t seem to be a better approach to avoiding that issue. We don’t have enough controllers to dowload via the controller to radio so hopefully it can be done via radio only?
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks!
We allow brain firmware update via a tethered controller (ie. Connect the controller to the V5 brain using a smart cable) from the VSCode extension. You have to start this manually and it will take several minutes.
Direct bluetooth based program downloads is something I’m working on integrating into PROS. I do have a working version that I’ve successfully used, but I’m still working out some bugs that make it not very consistent. I’ll let you know if/when I get it working properly.
Was there a minimum firmware version that this works on? I know there are a handful of local teams with damaged USB port on their brains and I’m thinking about what I can do for them at inspection. Also, does this work with the standalone updater or only vscode?
When we first looked at this, I tested with updating from 1.0.7 to the latest vexos. However, there were improvements made in vexos 1.1.0 that improved reliability. This should only be used as a last resort method of updating, it will take 7-8 minutes and is not guaranteed to work 100% of the time. One issue is that during certain parts of the update the V5 brain cannot continue to communicate with the controller, obviously this creates an issue when relying on controller to brain communication as the update path, we have to work around that issue and it has been improved with more recent vexos releases.
Only VSCode extension.
That’s one issue we face, there is such a range of OS versions and BLE hardware being used that compatibility testing is challenging.
Like many in this thread, we have a brain with a broken USB port. We tried using the VSCode approach, connecting the controller to the V5 brain via smart cable, but unfortunately the VSCode Vex extension doesn’t show the option for upgrading the firmware. Our current brain is on 1.1.2, so we’re trying to upgrade it to 1.1.4. We are running VSCode on MacOS. Is this firmware upgrade path something that’s only supported on specific versions of VSCode (ie.: Windows)? Or is there anything else we need to change with our VSCode setup?
Thanks a ton for that last tip and for everyone’s input on this thread, it worked perfectly! We now once again have a working brain that we can use in competition, team’s super excited!
