Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Even though the Talons sounded very tempting with their sealed form factor and mostly passive cooling, I was adamant about not using them in 2013 since they were new, and I had no idea how well they'd hold up.

Early adopters of the talons, hold-outs, opponents and proponents: as the season nears it's climax, where do you stand on the talons now?

Have they proven their mettle? have they earned you respect? and the ultimate test: will you use them in 2014?

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

At GTRE very few teams were using anything but talons. The only big team not using talons that I saw was 1114 who only used victors as they are sponsored by IFI (I was told this by a team member).

While not applicable to FIRST I love that talons can take up to 28 volts and have a higher update rate than victors. We will continue to use them for the foreseeable future.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used the new Victor 888's _exclusively_ and are _very_ pleased with their performance.

Not so pleased with _our_ performance this season, but the Victors played no role in that.

We'll continue using Victor 888's in future seasons.

--Michael Blake

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Talons 100%. No issue at all with them, and the space saving was huge compared to Victors and (moreso) Jags. Unless you are sponsored by IFI, have a very large stockpile of Victors/Jags, or if you are using CAN, I don't see why anyone would use anything but Talons in the future.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used 10 talons on our robot, and they worked beautifully. One did stop working halfway through a regional... We didn't have time to troubleshoot so we swapped it quickly. I think it might have just been a loose connection, but we won't know until we get the robot out of the bag (MN State competition May 18) and have some time to hook it up and test.

Overall, I think they performed great!

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We (Team 1540) used Talons this year and were extremely happy with their performance. Because of the new size restrictions (54" cylinder) we had to minimize the space used for control systems (electrical). In previous years, we had used Jaguars over Victors due to reliability, but this year we found the Talons were as reliable as Jaguars but with the surface area (about) of a Victor. This helped so much to cut down the size of the control board, which was extremely beneficial this year.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

The update rate really doesn't matter if you are running code slower than the update rate you are running (e.g. we run our code at the relatively fast rate of 10ms/iteration, so the standard Victor update rate of 10.1ms vs a Jaguar or Talon at 5.05ms would make no difference)

I also played with (psudo-accidentally) updating the Victor 884's at 5.05ms and it worked fine. The new 888's appear to be spec'd down to 2.1ms cycle time (with a max pulse width of 2ms) but using a cycle time that isn't a multiple of 5.05ms requires some additional timing calculations (it's not hard, if I were to try to run my code at 7ms and update the PWMs at 3.5ms it would be possible).

BUT since the code still calculates the pulse width at 10ms the update frequency doesn't matter at all below that. In fact, the default code updates at somewhere around 20ms in the main loop in LabVIEW (not exactly sure, it's not timed well) so the 10.1ms vs 5.05ms update rate wouldn't affect anything.

We ran Talons on our test chassis in late December without fans and were so happy we ran them on all of our 2013 motors (there are 11 on our robot) without any fans.


Edit: I see absolutely no reasons to use a Jaguar in FRC. The reliability history is poor (in my time on 33 we've blown ~3x more Jaguars than Victors, yet used ~6x more Victors on robots), although the changes by IFI should help that, the CAN implementation is poor (synchronous blocking) and increases single point failures, and they're freaking huge.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

The "standard" update rate of the Talon driver in WPILib is 10ms not 5.

At least it is in the 12/20/2012 version of Talon.java.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Not sure what your experiences have been with victors. I have used jaguars from 2010-2012, and victors from 2002 to about 2009. i am pretty sure I had more broken jaguars in 3 years then all my years of using victors.

I finally went back to victor this year and I really like the 888s this year. I will have to try the talons this summer.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Testing of the controllers showed that Jaguars have a better curve on output, which convinced us to use jaguars for our drive motors, but we will continue to use victors for all other control.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Unlike many new products, we didn't encounter any "gotchas" this season using 100% Talons (not the SRs, the original version) in fanless operation. We're running a total of nine motors each on both our practice bot and competition bot (WCD with two CIMs each side, everything else RS-550s). In two regionals and lots of driver practices so far we've encountered no issues that weren't of our own making. We took the risk because we had sufficient inventory of Victors we could fall back on if necessary; it was not.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Does anyone have any experience with directly comparing the Talon and the Victor 888? I know a lot of teams went from 884s to Talons, but I am interested to hear if people have tried both new speed controllers and found major advantages or disadvantages in one type.

We used 888s on our drive and 884s elsewhere, extremely satisfied with the performance of the 888s.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

As of now, only the Jags have CAN capability, which we utilize for more than just setting he output voltage.

Therefore, Jags

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Better than what? What kind of testing?

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

(My emphasis)

If you are careful about avoiding metal shavings raining down on the Jags, I'm not sure they are any less reliable than some lots of Digital Sidecars.
The DSC is also a single point of failure and disables all PWM controlled motors, whereas with a daisy chained CAN bus you may have several motors operational before the cabling failure point.

However I don't argue with your other points about size & CAN blocking implementation.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Not the way we've managed to break them. The just lose a channel or two.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I would just like to make it clear that, while we are extremely thankful for the support of IFI, we would use Victors either way.

Year after year they have proven to be a reliable and robust component of our robots.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I would do to our remaining jags what they will eventually do to themselves and burn them, if the students would let me... :(

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used only Victor 888s and we were very pleased. Other than some slight issues when using "y" PWMs on drivetrain Victors, everything went very well. They are very robust and we haven't had to replace a single one yet (through 2 regionals and lots of practice). I would like to run talons for next year, game permitting (need of PID loops for shooter wheels or whatnot in an instance where very linear response is necessary).

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used a combination of Talons and Jaguars this year. I was very impressed with the Talons' resilience; we lost connection one match and ran into a wall, stall all 4 CIMs for the remainder of the match. One talon burned, but the rest were undamaged.It was later determined that the burned talon was due to a wiring fault.
We will probably use Talons for all drive motors in the future, and Jaguars for sensor-based or precision applications.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Did you press the E-Stop? That's pretty much the reason it exists.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I believe we graphed output in volts over input in percentage (-1.0 - 1.0). The result showed remarkable consistency between jaguars while victors varied wildly and no two victors were alike. Also, jaguar graphs showed a smother curve of input to output than victor graphs. I don't have the chart on hand right now.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We moved from exclusively Jaguars last year to a mix of Jags and Victor 888's.

We would have replaced the Victors with Talons except we were late to the party and couldn't get any Talons when we needed them. We were also worried that if the stock was so limited and we had a failure, we would be unable to replace them.

Next year I expect we will continue to use the combo of jags and victors. Victors for things that don't require advanced control like the drive mtoors and Jaguars for things like shooters, arms, etc...

Jaguars, we do use CAN and the advanced features like PID internal to the Jag and wiring limit switches directly to them to reduce response time. Another great feature of the Jaguar that we used this year is the ability to run them independent of the general control system.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Was this open-circuit voltage, or did you have a load applied? If no load, the results are not too meaningful for FRC purposes.

If you did have a load, what were you using for a load?

What kind of Victors? 884 or 888? They have substantially different output curves. The 888s are considerably more linear than the 884s.

This thread is about Talons too. Did your testing include looking at the Talon output?

If not, you might be interested in these test results.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Our load was a motor that we had lying around. I'm not sure which kind. I believe we had a mix of 888s and 884s, but mostly 884s. We didn't have more than four 888s, the amount we needed.
We couldn't get our hands on talons unfortunately.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Sorry about misquoting you guys. I should have worded that better.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Has happened to us too. Now thats a problem we didnt expect.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

2470 used a combination of victors and jags this year. Needless to say we will never be using Jaguars again, at the competition we ended up replacing all of our jags with victors as the jags kept failing. I told the kids we were going to try out Talons next year.

Now that it is the off-season for us I've started to do some testing as to why our jags failed. So far I've found that anytime the robot is enabled and one of our problem jaguars has an active PWM connection the LED indicator light will blink red as if it was getting a reverse signal. I've tried just about everything to stop this from happening - replacing the limit switch jumpers, reseting the jag etc. but it continues to not work. My diagnosis at the moment is a failed thermistor.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Was the motor loaded, or free-spinning?

That might explain your differing results. They have dissimilar output characteristics.

The link I provided has test results for Jag, Vic884, Vic888, and Talon.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used a combination of talons and victor 888s this year and are extremely satisfied. We used the talons on our drive and found that it feels smoother than the jags we have on last year's bot of similar size, weight, and drive train. We used victors for our shooter and out elevation adjustment and saw no flaws in operation that weren't our own fault.
However, we found out very late that the victors do not have the same size pwm port as the talons and our pwms didn't quite fit until we shaved them down.
Overall we are very pleased and will continue to use both in the future.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Are these the old design Jags from Luminary and/or Texas Instruments? Or are you talking about the improved design (conformal-coated PCB) from Vex?

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

They are all pre-2013, we have some VEX jags from the PDV but we have not used them.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

It's important to make that distinction. VEX has invested a lot of time and money, and worked very hard to improve the Jag.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Thank you for the suggestion, we were originally going to use the new jags on the robot but we had a few problems with our PDV. They ended up arriving after we had installed the bulk of our electrical system and we never got around to replacing them.

We are currently two motor controllers short on our robot, I'll see if I can convince the kids to put the new jags on. Are the changes documented anywhere?

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I provided a link in an earlier post.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used 888s because we got shut out from Talons (FIRST Choice debacle then out of stock right before we ordered).

I have nothing bad to say about the 888s, other than I still hate the finicky PWM connectors.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Interesting.

I assumed that since Mike Copioli said the Talon would accept a PWM to something around 3ms that it was set in the WPIlib to 5.05ms (1 DIO loop frequency)

I set ours to 1 DIO loop frequency (5.05ms) and have no issues, not even with practice bot Victors using the Talon output scaling and pulse period of 5.05ms. I'm not entirely sure why the output frequency was ever set to 2 DIO loops (10.1ms) to begin with, or why the DIO loop is 5.05ms instead of 5ms or something even faster.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Accidentally applied unregulated 12V to the output of a Talon, nothing happened. Eight Talons on each of two robots. We're happy with them.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I am going from memory, I don't have the WPILibJ in front of me, but as I recall there were notes on the PWM class about compatability across all PWM devices (servos as well as motor controllers). The 5.05 results from a base rate in microseconds in the 6us range, times 770 or so. The particular devices get a multiplier of the 5.05ms and Victors and Talons were 2x (10.1ms) and Jags 1x. This is in the latest update of the Java libraries, but again its from memory, so check the PWM class to be sure.

In keeping with the original question: We used 8 talons and 2 jaguars. The jags were applied where we wanted HW limit switches.

We have did lose one talon during the season, the one controlling the front wheel of our shooter.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

What speed control algorithm were you using?

Did anyone else have a Talon failure while using it to control a shooter motor?

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We did have to calibrate several of them though... it is hard to say though how much of an improvement that was if any at all. As far as I could tell, it just confirmed full power on the LED feedback, where before it didn't.

The other minor issue is that it seems like it requires a special skill to connect the pwm's into the victors correctly to make them stop blinking.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

No feedback at all, we found the frisbees flight was not very speed sensitive. We used light wheels that recover quickly. The rear motor was set to 70% and the front to 100%. There was a 1.75 second delay between shots to allow recovery.

Motors are mini CIMs, banebots wheels (orange tread), about 3/4" compression.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

2175 has never really liked the Jaguars very much. They are big, and we have had sever release their magic smoke on us. In 2012 we decided to try Victors and loved them. They were smaller and simpler and worked 100% of the time. This year - 2013 - we decided to try the new Talons. We loved them even more and are planning on going with them next year. They are even smaller than the Victors and have no need for a fan. We still put fans on our drive Talons but that was because a team member touched them and overreacted... If we had to rate our order of choice for speed controllers it would be:
1) Talons
2) Victors
3) Jags

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Talons 100%. Our design did not call for electronics space (oops) so we had a very hard time fitting all the components. Talons saved us. We were forced to fit 9 talons in a 6"x8.5" space. None of them have failed, amazing.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

this year 230 went with talons. We always used victors but we tried something new. We never had a problem with them overheating or anything else, without their small foot print our electrical board wouldn't have worked either.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I voted for Talons, but, I must also add, you need to pick the right speed controller for the job.
I also like the Jaguars. The closed loop control is something that neither the Talon or Victor can do.

When it comes to PWM only controllers. I pick the talon hands down.
The "sealed" unit really does the job of preventing shavings from getting inside.
The linearity and performance is outstanding.

Great new speed controller, we used 8 of them this year.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

We used Talons exclusively this year. 10 of them (and another 10 on our 2nd robot). We mounted small fans on each of there to supplement cooling. We've had zero failures to-date after two Mid-Atlantic district events and the Mid-Atlantic Championship; 36 qualifying matches, 18 elimination matches and a lot of practice later.

We've used mostly Jaguars (with a few Victors) in the past 4 robots. We do not use CAN.

By this point in the season, I would have expected to have toasted a few Jaguars. Not so with the Talons. (We did purchase a Talon last Fall and tortured it nearly to death).

The Talon PWM connector is more secure than either the Jaguar's or Victor's. No problems with loosing PWM connection either.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

For the record, I've run exclusively Jaguars the last 2 years. They were on a CAN Network (which I agree, is terrible). I may have burned out one last year (I don't recall 100% so I'm allowing the possibility) but I haven't had any problems this year. So, that's roughly 20 jags (7 this year, 13 last year) with maybe one failure.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Anyone from CTRE or AndyMark want to chime in on availability of Talons to support this year's FRC season in a timely manner? We had committed to the Talon form factor and bought 8 of them up front, but when we went back for more and for spares they weren't available until APRIL, and we weren't willing to go into competition with zero spares so we ended up having to fit Jag's in a few places. I'm sure a lot of teams are like us and don't have an endless supply of funds available up front so we're not willing or capable to overstock ourselves just because a supplier can't maintain inventory. I'll give it to first year availability and being overwhelmed with the response, but I'd really like to hear that they (or AndyMark) have done something about it before I commit this year. It doesn't matter how good they are if you can't get them.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

The only time I have ever seen a DSC fail was when a student ignorantly put 24VDC into it and created quite the light show.

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

I saw a few DSC's fail last year (including one on my team's robot!), likely due to metal shavings in all cases. In some cases, they came back after getting blown out, and it was just a small short on the 5V rail.

I've also seen the cable from the cRio to the DSC come out more times than I can count!

Re: Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?
 

Short 4-40 screws are well worth the investment!