After teaching robotics at Seaquam for 7 years nothing has frustrated me more than the VEX V5 Hardware. The electronics have a fatal flaw in their design: the micro usb ports used for data transfer and charging are incredibly easy to break and they have zero official avenues for repair. With a broken usb port the V5 brains and controllers are effectively useless because you can’t download code to the brain or update its firmware and you can’t charge the controller!

Cost of a new controller is $179.99 cost of a new brain is $534.99. (and that’s before tax and shipping) The efforts to fix these components rather than throwing them out could save our school thousands of dollars.

So after years of controllers and brains being damaged in this way I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. With the help of one of my junior students we opened some of the controllers up to do a better assessment and figure out what could be done to repair them.

We found that many of the ports had completely broken off INSIDE the controllers while other controllers still charged but don’t transfer data anymore. This might mean that they just need to be cleaned, otherwise the microUSB port will need to be fully replaced with a new one. Because my micro-soldering skills leave something to be desired my next avenue is to take them to a cellphone repair shop to get some advice and see if they might be able to fix the port.