What NEW Vex Accessories Would You Like TO See?

[Eric Jensen]

My principal gripe with the Radio Shack sensors so far is that they are too wide-angled. I can't get useful performance from the light sensor or the line follower without a very tight sunshade. (LEGO uses a relative pinhole on its light sensor. VEX covers half the sky.) The ultrasonic sensor can detect an inch wide post at a reasonable distance, but it can't seem to detect a foot wide hole at more than about a foot of distance. The beam is too wide.

The VEX "line follower kit" uses infrared. LEGO uses visible light. VEX is harder to use because infrared reflectivity does not match visible light reflectivity, so picking line colors is a bit counterintuitive, and explaining it to the spectators even harder.

It would be nice to package two sensors in the "optical shaft encoder" so that I could detect direction of rotation. (So I can carefully bolt the two sensors in the kit together with a 2 degree skew, but that's iffy. Can't we do as well as the X axis on my mouseball?)

How about an analog angle sensor? A wide angle LED and sensor looking at a printed card should be able to report something like sine and cosine of rotation angle pretty cheaply.