I bought one of these when they frist came out and it is great except for one major thing. I bought the kit to hook up to my laptop to experiment with vision and intelligence. I figured the robot would save me a few months and even some money designing my own equivalent and be super easy to modify. Unfortunately FIRST didn't come out with its Programming module for 4 months and when it did it was only windows compatible and was only to program the pic microcontroller. There is no easy way yet to send easy commands out your serial, parallel, or better usb port to communicate with the robot. This is a major feature that they need to include. Computer science laboratories and even highschools now spend tons of money on robots for vision or intelligence applications. They don't want to design the robot themselves, they want to just have something they can set their laptop on, get some physical real world data from and instruct to move it around. The vex would be an ideal tool but there is no interface for this.
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It looks great! Especially without a decent camera, batteries to last it more than 30 seconds or a transmitter good for over 30 yards.
Check these out http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/ http://www.vexrobotics.com/index.php/posts?thread_ id=5&offset=0
I bought one of these when they frist came out and it is great except for one major thing. I bought the kit to hook up to my laptop to experiment with vision and intelligence. I figured the robot would save me a few months and even some money designing my own equivalent and be super easy to modify. Unfortunately FIRST didn't come out with its Programming module for 4 months and when it did it was only windows compatible and was only to program the pic microcontroller. There is no easy way yet to send easy commands out your serial, parallel, or better usb port to communicate with the robot. This is a major feature that they need to include. Computer science laboratories and even highschools now spend tons of money on robots for vision or intelligence applications. They don't want to design the robot themselves, they want to just have something they can set their laptop on, get some physical real world data from and instruct to move it around. The vex would be an ideal tool but there is no interface for this.