VEX vs. LEGO

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
21

I don’t think anyone is trying to make NXT sound “bad.” But the audience to be considered is important, and the person who asked the original question had already worked with Vex at school, so he had some previous robotics experience.

Quite frankly, I loved LEGO Mindstorms from the moment I saw it. My son bought a kit at age 12, self-learned and built non-stop with every book he could find, and competed in FLL for 2 years before he “aged out”. He could have easily gotten a couple more years out of competing before “saturating.”

We made the jump to Vex out of necessity. Besides being too old for FLL, when he toured a university with a strong engineering program, one of the professors told him “LEGO Mindstorms is a great way to start, but if you’re serious about studying engineering at this school, you’ll need to go beyond LEGO Mindstorms to be considered.”

But when he got a Vex kit, after the initial building, the kit sat in the closet for almost a year. There were no published resources to move forward, and it took quite a while to figure out how to use it well. Vex takes longer to get used to, but with 8 motor ports and 16 sensor ports, there are things that you can do that are impossible with Mindstorms NXT.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT is very cost-effective and my # 1 pick for someone starting robotics for the first time, especially for younger students. There’s a lot of good learning to be had with LEGO, even for 14+ year olds. But the practical reality is that one of the best ways to keep moving forward and getting better is to take part in a competition where you can rub shoulders with other builders. If you’re 14+, you will find fewer competition options with LEGO NXT (Robofest is one option, but not widely available) than with Vex.

BTW, the FTC competition uses the Tetrix system, which is different from LEGO Mindstorms NXT. Although it uses the NXT “brain”, the cost of all the additional metal and other parts needed for a reasonable robot makes it far more expensive than the $250 (or less if on sale) Mindstorms NXT cost, and even more expensive than Vex.

22

Hi, your post is very interesting!

I will star a new project in junior school, I’m referring to a kids from 11 - 15 years old. I think VEX could be a very good option to teach/learn Robotics in this project. I know LEGO has a lot of kid experience and VEX could be better for youth (15+ years to college) not for teenagers, well, I think so.

And the starting kit for LEGO are cheaper than VEX. Could you give any advice/tip for Robotics in teenagers?

Thanks.

23

My opinion is that the LEGO kit is good for the younger students, and that the FIRST LEGO League is good until the students are old enough to be ready for 2-vs-2 competition.

Once their emotions are mature enough for their opponents to be people instead of a clock; most students are ready to compete against a real person, and they want to compete against a real person.

For classroom work (no tournaments), young and old students like the bigger, sturdier pieces that Vex offers, and older students like programming software that Vex offers.

However, LEGO can work out OK in older classrooms too.

Blake

24

Wow, the resurrection of a 2008 thread. :smiley:

I think that if mindstorms is used with the tetrix platform as is done in FTC, it can be as versatile as vex. Though I personally like vex better, there are some things about lego that I wish vex had. For example, the nxt has more memory than the cortex, a built in screen, and all the other stuff that was mentioned earlier.

The nxt definitely has more sensors than vex does.

You can use motor controllers to have as many motors as you want, well maybe not infinite, but many more than vex allows, and you can use a sensor multiplexer to add more sensors.

Just my 2 cents

25

VEX is much more customizable. Lego has 2 advantages (1) parts are cheaper smaller, more scaleable, and in greater variety, allowing more creativity in design by using a lot more parts. (2) a greater variety of sensors are offered. this falls down if you happento have your own pwm crimping kit, or extra servo wires and a soldering iron, because the vex system is easy to add sensors too.
My favorite aspect of the vex system is that the parts are structurally sound and work together efficiently, lego is not good for creating high strength robots.

26

If the TETRIX platform is used, it is definitely as strong, or stronger, than vex metal.