Cheap Electrical Parts

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by roboruler

The use of a R/C transmitter to control a robot could give the wrong impression in demonstrations and make the audience think that your robot is nothing more a glorified R/C car than it is a robot(it is an R/C car if you are using this control method).

(full disclosure still applies)

If the robot is going to need programming and be operated without troubleshooters around, then a VEX Cortex is a perfectly good option. (Note that you're going to need to change genders on the PWM outputs, either by crimping new cables or using both male ends of a Y cable.) However, at $400 there may be alternatives that provide the needed functionality (depending, of course, on the team's parts pile and willingness to figure out a new platform that may or may not be built with this particular application in mind).

That said, 4901 has a Cheap and Dirty radio that's seen public use (we ran the Team Cockamamie build on it at Relay for Life--not exactly a high-tech affair) and several drive bases were running them at the AndyMark booth at Championship. While I agree that none of them were true robots in the textbook definition, probably 99.5% of the people were too engrossed in the object being controlled to care--and the other 0.5% that bothered to ask learned the differences between our competition robots and a demo robot. It's just not that big a deal.