[FTC]: Sensor Ideas

[TRWSHSHLX]

Looks awesome!

From maneuverability perspective this is great (totally dig the motor inside wheel assembly btw) but the Tetrix wheels have a tendency to be quite slippery (well not slippery but it's not good for traction).

Have you thought about using LEGO motors to do the servo's job? I know there are much more complications but the advantage is they have built in encoders. (oh and btw there's no limit on how many encoders you can use... just ports. Even then you can still have a SMUX that hooks up to four protoboards... on EACH LEGO SENSOR PORT!!!) Theoretically that's 12 (assuming you want to save one for the motor controller, even though that can be hooked up to the SMUX also but I personally never tried it) SMUX ports (or 15 if you decide to connect the Motor Controller to one of the SMUX).

Anyway, I don't recall how many Digital ports are on each SMUX (I think it's 6?) so yeah. If you run out of space for encoders to plug in in motor controllers, just wire it up to the SMUX. A bit more programming required but it definitely works.

Lastly, our team actually built a robot with only 3 TETRIX metal structural pieces! I'll post some picture if I get around to it (preparing for VEX Worlds). We won't be attending CMP because we want to dedicate our resources to VEX (even though the FRC robots look so legit and tempting to go watch).

Oh btw, THE RENDERS LOOK AWESOME!!!

Oh just actually read through your post again and saw the note about the protoboard. The old protoboard has 6 (don't quote me on it) digital and 5 (analog) ports. And the digital ones can be programmed to be I / O (not when it's on the SMUX but oh well). You just wire it up like how encoders are wired up (2 ports in Digital ports). The new protoboard has much more ports and much more functions for analog ports but I have never experimented with one so I can't speak for it.