With all this being discussed, I would rather encourage development on the wireless capabilities to program the brains. Or concerns are keeping the brains operational and not needing to buy a box of cheaply made cables from Amazon each year.
I think it would be cool of Vex made a dongle that plugged into a laptop which emulated a controllers ability to transmit programming to the robot.
Why do we even need a dongle? Isn’t bluetooth built in? Why not have a phone app that emulates a controller? Or download directly from a computer via bluetooth?
As far as I know, the Bluetooth that is in the brain is nowhere near strong enough for the download of code.
What makes you say that? Transfering <1Mb of data doesn’t take considerable resources. I’d be willing to bet people would gladly endure 10x download times to be able to do it wirelessly with the bluetooth built into their laptop.
Actually Vexcode on iPad does use bluetooth to download code. It uses the radio set to bluetooth data mode. As far as I know this is the only way to use Vexcode on the iPad.
This is what makes me believe there is no technical reason why we can’t do it on PC, it’s just a matter of resources for development.
To be clear: Bluetooth is bad. The connection is spotty and inconsistent. You need to power cycle the robot every few minutes and pair unpair and repair frequently. As it stands now, wireless downloading through a USB cable to the controller is by far the most practical method across V5 programming software. Before bluetooth downloading could be effective for PC versions it would need to be substantially improved.
I believe that bluetooth is contained inside the radio, not the brain.
VEXcode V5 will support BLE downloads on Chromebook, Windows, and Mac (Similar to how it works today for Android and iPad) at some point. It’s been relatively low on the development priority list as most people use USB direct or USB to the controller for downloads.
I think, for me at least, it is not about the transfer speeds, or how outdated it is. It’s about it not breaking off. We’ve had two brains break out of 3 teams, just from very minor accidents. We’ve had to take major precautions this year just for that not to happen again.
yes, the V5 radio is either working in vexnet mode or BLE (there are some differences between bluetooth and bluetooth low energy, vex uses the latter). We have test code that downloads reliably from laptops, the problem for all competition teams is that you need to be using vexnet at competition, so you would be constantly switching back and forth between the two modes.
Are there plans to move competitions from VexNet to BLE now that Cortex is not allowed in competitions?
This seems like a chicken and egg problem. Most people only use it because that’s the only option. I stand by my statement that given the choice between using a fast cable and all the potential port damage that it brings or a slower BT connection that won’t break your port, people will choose the later.
I second this. A VEXnet USB dongle to allow a computer to communicate over VEXnet would be great. Maybe something like that could even connect to Tournament Manager so we could run matches fully wirelessly. Maybe something like that is already in development? Or ready to be released? 
Come on, you can tell us, we won’t let anyone else know 
It’s more of a small development team and lots of other features on the roadmap. You can download code today from a PC / Mac / Chromebook with a USB cable, so adding a second method of downloading is currently a lower priority than say adding support for new devices / firmware updates / platforms / operating system updates.
You’re absolutely right, which I had postulated a few posts earlier. Hopefully someday it will get to be a higher priority. Until then those of of with brains with bad USB ports will continue to be sad pandas.
What, this one?
(Sorry Illyana. You were too slow. )
Lol, that’s a nice one.
And with USB-C in the news again ( USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard - The Verge ) and speaking of doubling down on power delivery…
Or, we could just replace the brain with one of the xkcd phones. Maybe xkcd 6, with the wireless charging?
The XKCD Phone 1 is wireless. Obviously, this means everything is completely wireless.
