Vexplororer or vex?

I have the Vexplorer claw, which works very well. With a little practice, the thing can pick up anything from a tennis ball to a CD.

Lets see, I got my kit half off for $150…
Power pack for $50, Programming kit for $100, advanced gear, $20, omni-wheel, $20, tank tread, $30, chain and sprocket, $30, 1x5x1x25 c-channels, $18, 100 keps, 'bout $3, 10 bearings, $5, collars, $10.50, 4 replacement plates, $9, 4 replacement 1x25’s, $5.50, replacement drive shafts, $5.50, replacement 12 & 36 gears, $6…

Still sure about vexing forever :slight_smile: ?

Thats $462.50 (if I paid full price for the kit it would be $612.50), and I’m pretty sure if I kept looking I’d find other things I bought…

And ATM my kit is sitting on a shelf because I’m idealess. Laugh. :frowning:

I don’t care how much it costs me, my dream is to have fun with robotics!:slight_smile:

If you don’t have any ideas, maybe you could make a robot that helps the enviorment. For example, it could pick up trash, or water flowers. you could make something that does a chore for you, like vacuum. You could also just challenge your self with an inventor’s guide challenge or try to make a robot that can do something to entertain you. :^D

my question is, how will you get the money?

I’m going to sell some of my model trains and other stuff.(old toys, weak pokemon cards, and maybe even some video games that I don’t like)
Plus, there’s Christmas and a birthday that just passed.:smiley:

I currently need a new microcontroller for the Flex, wich is overflowing with sensor inputs.:frowning:

I’m wondering, if you had a reverse signal splitter that connects 1 motor to 2 microcontrollers, could you control it from either one? or would you need one controller to tell the other controller to activate the motor?

You couldn’t control a single motor from two controllers. The signals would mix in a way that would confuse the motor. It would either not run at all, or it would run erratically.

As you suggest, you’d need the motor controlled directly by a single microcontroller, but it could be talking to other microcontrollers to decide what the motor should be doing.

Cheers,

  • Dean

How can I make two microcontrollers to communicate?

you could connect them together, one plugged into a digital output and one into a digital input, then when they want to activate a certain motor, one controller sends a digital output signal to the other; again, I don’t know if this would work.

I think you might need to use the Tx and Rx ports.

That would work, though you would want to only connect the white and black wires between the two micros. The red wire carries power, and you don’t want one controller trying to power the other one.

Of course, this approach is limited to sending a single bit of data (per set of ports).

That is certainly the most flexible way to have two (or more) controllers talk. Again, you only connect the white and black wires between the microcontrollers. The Rx from one micro goes to the Tx on the other, and vice-versa.

Once you’ve got them connected, you then have to develop the software to drive the serial ports. About the simplest way to use it is to send single-byte commands. Each different byte (or character) can be thought of like a button press, or limit switch closure. If one processor sends “A”, then the other one has code to know that “A” means to start (or stop) doing something.

Anything more complicated than this becomes a real protocol. For instance, if you want multi-byte commands, the software on both sides has to be smart enough to stay in sync: If you receive “AB”, is that a command, or is it the middle of the sequence “AABB” which is supposed to be the two commands “AA” and “BB”. Obviously it can get pretty complicated from there, which leads to protocols like Ethernet and USB.

Cheers,

  • Dean

Thanks! I’ll have to use the TX and RX ports because all of the rest are in use. How do I program the TX and RX?