Vex Edr Newbie!

VEX V5 Technical Support
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I am from Lesotho and my team has been incited to participate in PARC in the Star League!!! So we were provided with a vex v5 kit without the clawbot and to top it off,we weren’t familiar with coding with the vex coding studio. We are trying to get by with the youtube channel but it pretty intensive. I will kindly appreciate tip from programming,connecting the devices up until making the robot functional.

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A few tips:

  1. have two points of support for every axle, that way the axle doesn’t flop around.

  2. small gear driving big gear = more torque less speed and vice versa.

  3. maximum of 8 v5 motors in competition for the season

  4. any wire fits into and works with any port on the v5 brain. Sensors can also be plugged in anywhere

  5. dr4b is a very simple lift, so try searching that up online

  6. see if you can find the clawbot instructions online. It should be accessible

Edit: you can download the vex coding studio from vex and use modkit. It’s not the best, but it’ll get it done

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I would strongly recommend you avoid VEX Coding Studio. From the sounds of it, you are probably interested in graphical programming, but the graphical programming in VEX Coding Studio (Modkit) is not suitable for competition usage.

Instead, you should look into Robot Mesh Studio Blockly. Blockly is graphical programming that is actually suitable for competition usage.

In case you are actually intending to do text-based programming, look into VEXcode or Robot Mesh Studio’s C++/Python/JavaScript options as alternatives to VEX Coding Studio.

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Wait: are you telling me the graphical in robotmesh is competition legal?

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Any language is legal so long as it allows the robot to obey the competition switch.

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Why wouldn’t it be? We’ve got competition control blocks in it and everything :slight_smile:

And ignoring the competition switch is not actually that can be done on the user CPU, so you would have to hack VEXos itself, which is outside of the capabilities of all the programming solutions that get talked about here on the forums and publicized. (It stands to reason that the people who are trying to cheat in such a manner don’t go around talking about it on official channels.)

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There is no “illegal code” as long as the students do the coding… RECF does not specify any particular platform.

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8

So what exactly is the competition switch?

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Well we did go online and as much as we are inexperienced, we are almost catching the hang of the vex coding studio particularly vex c++. The modkit isn’t that satisfying and it helped that we’ve been taught c++ generally before…

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If I may,how is the bumper actually used?
As for the clawbot,online examples most have the necessary materials and its hard to get access of them…
And we decided on using vex c++ so I’d like to know a code that could make a motor that runs forever from when the competition begins.
Thanks for the tips!!!

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In that case, you should still stop using VEX Coding Studio.

VEXcode uses the exact same VEX C++ API that you find in VEX Coding Studio, but the editor is significantly better.

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The bumper switch is a very simple sensor. It is literally a button — your code can check if a bumper switch is pressed or not pressed at any given time.

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You probably already know that there is a competition template that you should use for developing competition code. In the driver control section of that competition template, you should have an infinite while loop (you probably already know this too).

All you need to do is, inside that infinite loop, call the function to run the motor at whatever speed you desire. As long as you never put any other function calls to control that motor, the motor will run forever (until driver control stops).

In case you are not actually familiar with the assumptions I made (competition template, infinite loop), no problem. Just ask and we (the community) would be happy to explain them to you.

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I am already familiar with the competition template and I’ve began using it thus far…thanks for the heads with the infinite while loop

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15

Thanks!!!
So we are having a problem with our claw…could you please suggest how we could do a claw that rotates about 90 degrees after picking up an object.

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If you want to rotate the claw 90 degrees you would most likely be using a gear mounted onto the base of the claw and have a motor turn that gear. Since the gear is mounted to the claw (but the motor is not, it is mounted onto something else), as the motor runs the claw will rotate.

I hope I didn’t misunderstand what you meant by rotate but this is one way to go about it.

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The competition switch is used to synchronize all robots during a robotics competition. It hooks into a vex controller and enables/disables the robots and sets them to autonomous/driver control.

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HI I have some videos to help get started with VEX Coding studio at : VEX Coding Studio Training Videos

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