vex lcd module factory

VEX Robotics is educational robotics for everyone. VEX solutions span all levels of both formal and informal education with accessible, scalable, and affordable solutions. Beyond science and engineering principles, VEX encourages creativity, teamwork, leadership, and problem solving among groups. It allows educators of all types to engage and inspire the STEM problem solvers of tomorrow!

The VEX ARM® Cortex®-based Microcontroller coordinates the flow of all information and power on the robot. It has built in bi-directional communication for wireless driving, debugging and downloading using the VEXnet wireless link. The Microcontroller is the brain of every VEX robot.

VEXnet devices contain internal processors and run on special software called Firmware (or Master Code). Firmware is updated periodically to provide additional functionality or fix bugs. To fully unlock the potential of VEX Robotics VEXnet devices, it"s important to ensure that all applicable drivers are installed and firmware is updated.

Download and run your program on your physical robot or the VEX IQ Remote Screen to test the results. If you are using the VEX IQ Remote Screen, use the animation below to help you find it under the Robot menu, in Debugger Windows.

I am really sorry for the delay. I didn’t find any appropriate option to configure the LCD in the motor sensor setup window. Could you please guide me through this?

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I have a warranty issue with my TD20 - different problem. Call Roland and they will tell you to ship it to them for service, but be prepared to be without your module for two weeks at least, most likely more.

If you live within driving distance of a service center (customer service can tell you where the nearest one is) and you don"t want to do without your module for a long stretch, try this approach: I took mine in and paid $40 rush charge to put it at the front of the line (24-48 hour wait to get it on the bench rather than 2 weeks). When it was decided the main board needed to be replaced, I asked if I could at least have the module to use in the meantime (since it still functioned, but had some noisy channels). The shop owner didn"t want to do this for fear that he would order the board and I wouldn"t come back so he could finish the work, thus being stuck with an expensive board that (supposedly) he could not return. I offered to let him run my credit card (not charge, just get the number, etc.) so he could ding me if I stiffed him, and he agreed.

My previous post described how VEX Integrated Motor Encoders (IMEs) work in general, and how they physically get connected together on your robot, aimed at someone who has never used them before. I intended this post to be more a in-depth discussion about the different uses of IMEs and things to look out for. However, the research I did on the VEX Forum for this post, combined with our team’s experiences this year (written in blue), have brought me to the firm conclusion that our team will never use them again. (Perhaps someday I will eat these words, but I doubt it unless the technology is upgraded.)

In lieu of my original intention, this post is now intended to be a resource for other VEX users that pulls together information from many disparate VEX Forum posts, all in one place, so you don’t have to go searching for the information in 20 different threads, a little bit here, a little bit there. If you’re having problems with your robot, and think it might be because of your integrated motor encoders (or cannot figure out what could possibly be the cause), please read on and see what you think based on the information that knowledgeable people such as the awesome jpearman have provided. This post is long, so here’s a table of contents:

That port that the daisy chain gets plugged into is labeled “I2C”, which stands for Inter Integrated Circuit; it’s a communication protocol that was intended to be used for processors to talk to each other inside the same device (on the same printed circuit board, even). It was never intended to be used over many feet of wire, the way VEX uses them.

The communication protocol between the cortex and IMEs is incredibly complex, and off-this-planet different from the way standard VEX sensors work. Here’s the description from the VEX Forum(from rockstar jpearman) of a typical sequence to send one byte of data from the master to a slave (edited slightly from his original, since I have not included all of his technical background; see original post for full details).

Attachment to the motor. This is the easiest one to test and fix; for some users, a change here could make all the difference. VEX Forum commenters widely report that screwing the black IME cap onto the motor too tightly prevents the black-and-white gear from spinning freely (and hence, counting properly). Other users reported poor results when the gear was dirty or greasy. (And, like any gear, if it has any damaged teeth, it’s obviously not going to function.)

Electromagnetic interference/noise. The complex signal running through the 4-wire cables can apparently be affected (badly) by external forces that are commonly present on VEX robots, like current running through neighboring wires that the 4-wire is bundled with, or if the 4-wire is running past a motor that is turned on (less certain about this last claim). From this VEX Forum thread, technik3k says [with my emphasis added in bold]:

jpearman sums things up rather nicely in this comment on a post from pretty early on in the IME’s existence, and I’m not sure why I only learned about it today, 5 years later. (If you don’t know what pulse width modulation is, please see my earlier post on VEX motors, or my post on motor controllers.)

Skipping gears (or wheel slippage). No one on the VEX Forum mentioned skipping gears, but this happened to us this year. Because the IME is on the drive shaft (as opposed to optical encoders, which are placed on the movement shaft, at the end of the gearbox), if the gearbox experiences slippage, the motor will be turning (and the IME counting), but the movement arm will not, resulting in a disconnect between where the IME (and your program) thinks the arm is, and where it actually is. For us, we had a systematic problem where the drive shaft motor with the IME (one of many moving the forklift) was coming away from its idler gear when our forklift was at the bottom of its motion, so every time the arm took a lap going up and then down, the IME would get off from its correct count by X clicks; after the forklift went up & down 10 times, our count would be off by 10X.

Static discharge (ESD – electrostatic discharge). There are many people talking about this on the VEX Forum. People in dry climates do say that they have clearly had their IMEs go offline due to static (mecanum wheels appear to be a big culprit). Robot drives around on rubber wheels and foam mats for a while, then robot touches field perimeter and the static that has built up finds a way to ground, and then the cortex/IMEs just can’t handle it (that’s my technical description). It’s real enough that at Worlds they treat the mats with anti-static spray. Here’s jpearman’s full-length discussion on ESD. The highlights:

Condition #2 above is described in the easyC/RobotC table above. jpearman says in his post that “Condition 1 is very rare, I have never experienced it.” However, we have, and so have a lot of other teams, and The Vex Raptors have given it the name “ghosting.” Read on.

[Note: many of the VEX Forum quotes included below are from RobotC users in the early days of the IME; RobotC did release an upgrade that cleared up these problems for many RobotC users (though the fact that very few top teams use IMEs should still say something). I have included their quotes here because they are exactly the types of behaviour that our robot experienced with easyC this season (2016-17). I can tell you with 100% certainty that we experienced ghosting as recently as January 2017 with easyC, and I have seen some RobotC Forum posts during the Starstruck season report behavior that still sounds a lot like ghoting to me.]

This is the real reason I’m never using IMEs again. Only after doing research for this post did I come to finally understand the (probable) cause of the bizarre problems that our robot has been having this season. The Vex Raptors on the VEX Forum are referring to this problem as “ghosting,” or the CPU getting, essentially, stuck running the last command that it received. In our lab, disabling field control or removing the VEXnet key did not even make the robot stop; the only remedy was turning the robot off. This is actually kind of difficult/dangerous if it’s stuck in a mode where the chassis is on—usually an adult has to jump onto the field and lift it off the ground while someone else reaches in and turns it off.

On one occasion, it actually got stuck on the LCD screen in the pre-autonomous section. We were on the practice field at States, and nothing would get it to reset, including turning the robot on and off, or changing the batteries. However, since we were at a competition, we had the 9-volt battery plugged into the cortex, which was keeping it “alive” through the battery change, and keeping it from resetting. For the rest of the day, we unplugged the 9-volt in between matches when we changed batteries, just to make sure that the cortex was really power-cycling.

So while jpearman in his ESD post (which was from a while back, albeit) said that the cortex crashing from ESD was extremely rare, here are some threads from the VEX Forum, that might make you feel better if this has been happening to you. It made me feel a lot better to know that all of these random, un-reproducible, unpredictable problems we have had since the beginning of our season were not because of something the girls were doing to the robot, or not doing to the robot, or something related to their programming (all of which seemed fine; also, we’re a big checklist-to-reduce-human-error kind of team).

We have had issues with static electricity and the IMEs. With the IMEs in, after about 30 seconds or more into driving the robot, the robot would just start being out of control. Disconnecting from Vexnet would not stop the robot. Disconnecting the IMEs did resolve the problem so the team is now using shaft encoders. –blatwell

Last year, several teams I know, including mine, encountered a similar issue (robot “ghosting” the last commands it received from the controller forever until it is turned off, but only while IMEs are plugged in). Most of us theorized that the problem is static electricity being collected by the IMEs sent to the cortex. We refer to this as ESD (Electro-Static Discharge). –The VEX Raptors

Team 24C and our team have both had problems with IMEs collecting static electricity and sending it to the brain. This can cause several different problems, most notably the robot doing whatever it was doing when it bugged out, infinitely until you turn it off. –The VEX Raptors

My experience with IMEs this year was that they failed on 50% of the runs after [our] lift moved up and down several times. After reading up on vexforum the only thing that became clear was that nobody really knows for sure what is going on. So, since we had plenty of other issues to deal with – we just moved to quad encoders and it worked flawlessly.…

Read through the various VEX Forum posts linked here, and you will see a lot of people report things like: their 5 IMEs were working fine for several months, and now nothing they can do will get the last 2 in the chain working and they’ve tried everything, and please help! … and here’s another update from the next day … now they turned the robot on, and all the IMEs are working fine. Over the course of the season for our robot:

Unplug the daisy-chain from the cortex every time you turn off/on the robot to make sure they are really really reset. I so wish I had known this when my team was using them. VEX Forum user Gold Rush says in this post:

Re-download your firmware onto the cortex. Per edjubuh on the VEX Forum (as mentioned above under Ghosting), try force-re-downloading the RobotC or easyC firmware onto the cortex (possibly on a regular basis, if it appears to have any temporary positive effects).

Troubleshooting process. The awesome jpearman on the VEX Forum offers a useful, systematic process of troubleshooting your IME system when you have (a) a system that used to work that now doesn’t, or (b) an IME daisy chain that stops working half-way through. In the second comment/response in this thread, he walks through the process of, essentially, rebuilding your chain from one motor on up, in a way that ensures that each IME and connecting cable is functional.