VEX V5 Brain
The VEX V5 Brain is the successor to the VEX Cortex and is the current electronics system used in competitive VEX.
Product Specs
V5 Robot Brain Specifications
Motor Ports
Any of the 21 Smart Ports
Smart Sensor Ports
Any of the 21 Smart Ports
Digital Ports
Any of the 8 built-in 3-Wire Ports
Analog Ports
Any of the 8 built-in 3-Wire Ports
VEXos Processor
One Cortex A9 at 667 MHz
Two Cortex M0 at 32 MHz each
One FPGA1
User Processor
One Cortex A9 1333 Million Instructions per second (MIPS)
RAM
128 MB
Flash
32 MB
User Program Slots
8
USB
2.0 High Speed (480 Mbit/s)
Color Touch Screen
4.25”, 480 x 272 pixels, 65k colors
Expansion
up to 16 GB, FAT32
Wireless
VEXnet 3.0 and Bluetooth 4.2
System Voltage
12.8 V
Size
4.0” W x 5.5” H x 1.3” L (101.6 mm x 139.7 mm x 33.02 mm)
Weight
0.63 lbs (285g)
Features
Select and run one of 8 user programs
Run built-in VEX programs
Run practice matches
Dark and Light Modes
Screen rotation
Dashboards
There is a built in dashboard for every connected sensor and device, from switches and potentiometers all the way up to motors and the battery.
3 Wire
The V5 Brain still has support for 3 wire devices. 3-Wire ports are now multi-purpose. Any 3-Wire port can be a digital input, digital output, analog input, or PWM motor control. A dedicated Cortex M0 microcontroller has the sole responsibility of reading inputs and toggling outputs. The data is reported to the user the moment it is measured. This means digital input changes trigger an immediate interrupt-based message to the user sensor memory to minimize latency. Analog inputs are pre-filtered for 5 milliseconds and then moved to the user sensor memory on a continual basis. The analog input is now 0-5V compatible to expand the number of compatible sensors. Future enhancements to the 3-Wire ports are planned to allow I2C and UART communication to non-VEX sensors as well.
3-Wire Specifications
V5 3-Wire Ports
Digital Ports
Use any of the 8 built-in 3-Wire Ports
Analog Ports
Use any of the 8 built-in 3-Wire Ports
3-Wire Expansion
Add 8 more ports using a 3-Wire Expander. The 3-Wire Expander uses one Smart Port.
Message rate - digital
On Change up to 1 kHz
Message rate - analog
5 mSec
Digital Input
High = 2.4 - 5.5 V Low = 0.0 - 1.0 V
Digital Output
High = 2.9 V min into a high impedance Low = 0.4 V max into a high impedance
Analog Input
0 - 5 V
Analog Input Resolution
12-bit
Power out
5v @ 2A total for all ports
Issues
The V5 has has some issues and other setback more can be seen in V5 Electronics Observations.
Future
VEX has stated that the V5 will bring a new batch of smart sensors:
The Bluetooth radio unlocks the ability of robot-to-robot communications along with custom iOS and Android apps written by users.
Teams Contributed to this Article:
BLRS (Purdue SIGBots)
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