Vex Components For Other Robots

[Robots_R_Us]

The Vex spocket and gear kit has plastic gears and chain....are these
Vex specific or are they sourced from a third party?

Also, has anyone reverse engineered the sensors to be able to use them
on other robot systems? In particular I am thinking of the ultrasonic,
rotational and light sensors.

Thanks

RRU

[Greg Marra]

Our team used the VEX ultrasonic sensor with great success on our FRC robot this year. I imagine nothing would prevent you from using any of the other VEX sensors, either.

[Gdeaver]

The Easy-C gear tooth sensor functions work with the Vex encoder. The KOP gear box output shaft has a tapped hole in it. A thread by 1/8" square adapter can be made to allow the vex encoder to work with the KOP gear box.

[Robots_R_Us]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Our team used the VEX ultrasonic sensor with great success on our FRC robot this year. I imagine nothing would prevent you from using any of the other VEX sensors, either.

When you says great success, what efforts needed to be done to handle the hardware/software differences?

RRU

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Robots_R_Us

When you says great success, what efforts needed to be done to handle the hardware/software differences?

RRU

I imagine that if you were using EasyC, almost nothing would have to be done different than on a VEX robot. However, we were using MPLAB, so it was simply a matter of writing an interrupt driven routine to measure when the echo came back from whatever we were pinging. It's identical to most other ultrasonic sensors, so you could read more about how to code for them elsewhere.

[John Gutmann]

to interface these sensors with a different system you would just need to know how to program to receive the signals from them. The major difference is that instead of using mostly drag and drop software you are using bare bones C. But hey it can't be as bad as using ASM.....Can it?

All the vex sensors will port over to other systems fairly easily. Our FRC bot this year lost a limit switch, and the only replacement we had was a vex switch... so we changed the wire (they're backwards) and put it on. No problems.

[David55]

One of the teams in Israel used the vex bumpers as buttons on their OI.

I found that interesting...