Addressable LED Control on the V5

2023-03-13 vex info

V5 Addrled

VEXos 1.1.2 introduced a new ability to control WS2812B addressable LED strips directly from the ADI on the V5. Previously this was semi-possible by bit-banging with APA102C strips, but the speed at which the V5 could send data to the lights was far too slow to be workable in any real application. User code, that being the code that runs on CPU1, is limited to updating the state of the ADI every 10ms. The protocols to drive lights require much faster timings than that to work properly, so until firmware was added to drive this directly from CPU0, controlling addressable lights wasn’t feasible.

VEX Tournament Manager Match Controller

2023-01-02 vex electronics 3dp

After reffing at my fair share of VEX tournaments in recent years, I’ve come to determine that I’m really not a fan of the web interface that is used to start/stop the match timers. Holding a phone or tablet like that in my hand for a long period of time is very bothersome to me and I wanted to design a better solution that would make the experience more bearable :3

Sylib - A Platform-Agnostic Library for Addrled, Motor Speed Control, and More!

2022-11-05 vex software

Features

Easy WS2812B Addressable LED control
Accurate motor velocity measurements
Template for making custom velocity controllers
Many kinds of pre-built filters for general use
Platform-agnostic, meaning it works with both PROS and VEXcode

Installation

PROS

Download the latest version of the Sylib template from the Releases page
In the directory where you downloaded the zip archive, run pros c fetch sylib@<version>.zip
In your PROS project directory, run pros c apply sylib@<version>
In your main.h file, make sure to include sylib/sylib.hpp
In /include/sylib/env.hpp make sure that SYLIB_SRC_PRESENT and SYLIB_ENV_VEXCODE are not defined, and that SYLIB_ENV_PROS is. This makes sure that the right headers are included, and that sylib uses the pre-compiled library provided by the template instead of trying to build it from the non-existent source (which would not compile in a PROS environment anyways).
In your initialize() function, make sure to include sylib::initialize();

note: Sylib requires PROS kernel 3.7.2 or later to run, and is not currently compatible with PROS 4