We are a low-cost scrappy FRC team from a inner city school in Houston,TX with tight budgets.
We don’t have enough money to buy another cRio so we had to improvise with a VEX Cortex. Turns out the VEX Cortex is a great low-cost options for testing your FRC Robots.
Well trained VEX students without any FRC experience were able to easily wire up our Regional Champion FRC robot (without any mentor guidance).
P.S. : I really did not want to rant about the single cRio program, but I’m from the OLD get your BRAND new control system every year IFI state of mind…
In all honesty, unless you are doing hardcore calculations and stuff, pretty much any micro processor can fill in for the cRio when testing hardware. Just you might have to manually program somethings like the communications.
We use the VEX Cortex controllers for OCCRA (in both the OCCRA VEX and large OCCRA robots). The only disadvantage is that the handheld controllers do eat batteries, a lot. As long as you don’t use any servos, you can feed them 12v without issue (we tried this for OCCRA), but if you use servos you have to use the 7.2v battery because the controller does not regulate the voltage going to the servos (and servos don’t do well with 12v).
They do work very well, and make great substitutes for FRC controllers.
