Quote:
Originally Posted by Levansic
One other observation I had was that poor design choices would lead teams on a quixotic search for scapegoat components. I saw quite a few 4-wheel tank drives that could go forward and back just fine, but would stall their CIM motors when attempting to turn. No doubt, it may have worked adequately on linoleum at home, but not on the competition carpet. Low gear ratios coupled with high-friction contact points at the corners colluded to make their drive systems into current sinks, causing system-wide brown-outs. Unfortunately, this is probably how some of the Jaguar naysayers got started.
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In all fairness the documentation of all the common troubleshooting and key design issues is strewn throughout this site. Previous firmware under the brownout conditions would stand an excellent chance of outright lock-up. Further there are still unresolved issues such as timeouts that haven't been adequately addressed so far as I am concerned (you can easily experience timeouts and still use CAN). As I built an entire robot myself at my cost to test them, I'm not bashing the Jaguars, but I am pointing out that not all the criticism that targets the Jaguar is undeserved. Even if some of the robots have poor design choices. One can easily make subtle poor design choices merely using the pre-built drive train components from AndyMark and a perfectly valid wheel system that will easily overload the Jaguars but the Victors will endure (it's not good for them either).
Each of these speed controls has a place. There's no reason they can't co-exist. The Jaguars do not lend themselves to situations where you don't have the time or the resources to focus on them. So, as I've pointed out elsewhere, it's not very surprising to me that newer teams would avoid them. Then again it's not entirely true the Victors are better, but they are very much like simple heavy-duty RC car speed controls (so the students are very likely to really relate to that).
I can only say further that to me a competition such as FIRST FRC is a capable enough place that we can all do things moderately differently without breaking out the 'cookie cutter'. I just hope that people don't camp on these ideas with polarity because this is very much about science and engineering and that's not necessary. I, for one, think that documentation and proactive effort on the part of the community and manufacturers would dramatically reduce a great deal of the undeserved bad reputation that Jaguars do get unfairly (I can't and won't deny that it does happen and it's unfortunate regardless of how it happens).