Thanks to all for your insightful responses. Although no ONE answer seems to be enough to justify forcing all teams to stop using the 883's, collectively, the arguments make it easier to agree with their decision.

Now, just keep your fingers crossed that we won't have 885's next year!

All in all the 884 is such a big improvement over the 883 it warrants the change. But there is other factors to consider...
Innovation FIRST has always been very helpful in replacing suspect components, helping research problems and truly listening to their customers, US. The 884 is a direct response to those requests in that it is a higher current, less deadband, more fine control version of their previous products. If you were at a competition this year, had used an 883 with the expected deadband and ran into a problem you thought was a speed controller, would you want to just drop in an 884 and hope it would be OK or would you want to get an exact replacement device?
Joe Johnson hinted that the output signal was about 1000Hz, and I found a data sheet from a few years back that stated it was 2000Hz for the '00 883. Although I have not seen any discussion on this subject (and would welcome that from a knowledgeable source) I would expect an interaction between frequency of switching, brush/commutator length, motor speed and ultimately accuracy of control. The 884 is theoretically attempting to optimize all of these factors and give us higher current outputs.

Thats all good but what if we dont need all of those things? Why are they forcing us to use 40 amp victors on 30 amp breakers (we can't even get the full usage of the 40 amps if we can only use 30 amp fuses), it makes no sence to me that we cant have something worse then other teams have if we want to, there is no unfairness to that besides the fact that these victors that we need to buy now might keep us from going to the nats just because now the playing field is unleveled between us and those with large sponsors that can afford more.

-no saftey risk
-poorer operation
.....how could that be unfair to other teams if we used them??

We do get 40A fuses this year, though.

While we do get 40 amp fuses, we only get four.

My team is using an 8 motor drive train, with 2 other non drive motors. Only 4 of those acutaly are able to take advantage of the 884's higher current rating (which I think is a silly idea anyways, but thats another post). So here we are, forced to buy at least 6 more of these things that are over rated and completly unnessecary. Its a huge chunk of our budget that we are forced to give up.

If FIRST wanted to get rid of 883's, fine, but wouldn't it be better for all of us if they were phased out? This year for instence, only 884's could be used on the 40 amp motors, with 883s being legal on all the others. Next year, move the FP up to a 40 amp breaker (which it should be on anyways) and so on, untill teams have had the chance to spread the cost of new 884's over a few years.

Frankly, I've been nothing but happy with the 883's. I've never had a problem with one frying because of to much current (and our 02 bot was a current monster), and I've always found them to be plenty accurate.

-Andy A.

I don't fully understand your post. If you are adding motor controllers that were not in the kit, you would have to post that charge against the cost of the robot anyways....no?

I'm not saying you would not have a REAL savings because you would be taking them from last years robot...but that fact does not change the fact that you would have to account for them in tne $3500.

Did I miss a point in there?

BTW: Last year was the Phase out year...there were both 883 and 884s in existance. Yes, only 883s came in the kits, but 884s were available to purchase. Had you bought the 884s last year, you could have used them this year. (but I think you would still have to "account" for the cost of any parts not provided in the kit either way)

-Quentin

Sorry, when I said budget, I was refering to the team budget, not the robot budget. Yes, we would have still account for the cost of the speed controllers against the $3500. That had already been assumed. But, we are now spending money we had hoped to use to offset the cost of nationals and other non robot costs. Had 883s be legal, we would still have 600+ in the team budget to spend on getting us to Texas.

I know I am just $@#$@#$@#$@#$@#ing at this point, but this is just one of those things that just annoys me to no end. We had thought that 884's had been offered last year as an alternative to 883's for fine arm control type aplications. Since we had nothing like that, we just stuck with 883's. I still curse that choice.

Was any annoucement made last year that 883's would be illegal this year? If one was, I'm going to kick my self silly...

-Andy A.

Andy, if there was such an announcement I'll do the kicking ;-)

But seriously, in my mind a "phase out" would be an announcement that says "both 883s and 884s are available this year, but next year 883s won't be allowed, so buy accordingly." We bought 883s last year expecting them to be spares for this year, and now we're holding the bag... My recollection, having ordered them last year is that we were given the choice based on functionality but not warned about the rule change for this year.

Team update 1 deletes all references to the victor 883s from the manual. Since they are clearly electronic parts, and they can't be purchased from digikey or FAI (and even if they could, they would cost more then $100 each), they are illegal.

As for references to the FIRST forum: http://jive.ilearning.com/thread.jsp...=38383 3#1055 http://jive.ilearning.com/thread.jsp...=3838 33#3156 and http://jive.ilearning.com/thread.jsp...q=383833 #956

Errr... I know FIRST has made them (883's) illegal this year and made a point of making that clear. That was never in question.

What I wanted to know was last year (the 2002 season and off season) was any annoucement made by anyone, FIRST or otherwise, that this would be the case for 2003? It seems that the answer is no, so I don't feel like a complete idiot.

When did IF annouce they were stopping production on the 883?

-Andy A.

Sorry, I misunderstood.

It wasn't announced that the victor 883's would be illegal till team update one. According to Innovation FIRST's news page, it wasn't announced that the 883s were discontinued till December 23 of last year. So, no, you were not the only one blindsided.