Yeah I know… It’d be so cool though.
glad to see the rules lighten up for college students
I hope the kit contents will be revealed soon.
Well, there’s obviously the battery voltage as the hard limit.
Besides that, it’s the firmware in the motors and unless VEX employs really good firmware integrity scheme, it’s possible to mess with the limits in the firmware.
More on that later…
Will there be no partner controller for v5?
There is only one kind of a controller. You can connect two of them together through their smart ports using the standard V5 cable (or perhaps the current partner cable might work too? I need to try…)
Right, but with a battery that can charge to 14.6v, breaking the (I am guessing )10v firmware limit would be very significant.
Can we get a bit more of a guarantee than “expected” and a month? Our cortexes have reached the end of their life and started dropping like flies, and i’d really rather not throw all of our money at a product that history says we won’t get this year.
An official release date would go a long way toward making up for the previous unreliability of VEX to deliver this system.
+1. I think that the V5 release date will have severe consequences on teams that rely on summer building. If teams will be trading in their cortexes in May, they will have no way of building during the summer (as V5 won’t arrive until August), giving them a significant disadvantage once they start competing in October/November.
Giving a specific release/shipment date would allow teams to better plan their build seasons around this issue.
How hard would it be to switch to V5 after using the cortex system? I’m planning on building a robot asap for a potential june comp, but I’d like to eventually switch to V5.
Motors are bigger physically - so you will need to plan where they will be in relationship to your structure. Many “legacy” sensors will work with the new system. VEX has done a nice job outlining this in their product page.
I think the big change will be migrating your software to Visual Code Studio - I would keep an eye out as information is released.
All in all, I like the V5 system.
One thing I still would like clarification on is that it says teams may fabricate their own steel or aluminum parts, but what about COTS systems or even just hardware such as alu rivets. We are in the process of revamping and hopefully transitioning over the coming years to an entirely custom sheet metal, or tube and gusset robot and are still somewhat unsure of the extent these part relaxations apply. Theoretically there is no way to prove that a purchased part was not made by the team.
Either way however I look forward to the growth of VEXU into an actual engineering design team rather than just a group of college students who did vex in high school and wanted to relive glory days. I think this may allow it to become an actual respected competition from a university’s viewpoint.
kinda bummed you can’t do metal 3d printed parts now 
Can we get the full speed torque curve for the v5 smart motors?
I’d recommend checking out this page: https://www.vexrobotics.com/v5-architecture.html
I have had similar questions, and it seems that, at least for this year, there is not a rule against buying off the shelf fully aluminum or steel parts. Think of it this way, some teams had their 3d printed parts printed by a company they lived near by, which means they didn’t necessarily build it themselves other than maybe a cad file. They paid a company to make their part for them because they didn’t have the equipment to do it. I imagine this year will be similar to that, many teams will source out of machine shops they live near. But when it comes to buying pre-made parts such as gear boxes, there really won’t be any way to tell at inspection. In my opinion they should keep it this way, as in allow for pre-made parts, it would take VEX to a higher level of realism and allow students in college to get more necessary real world skills. I mean in real life you aren’t going to be building your robots out of erector set look-a-likes, you will CNC most parts out and will have to design every curve and angle perfectly in some cad software, and I hope that’s what these new rules will turn VEXU into.