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Unread 22-04-2012, 14:48
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Re: TI and future Jaguars

Quote:
Originally Posted by dsirovica View Post
Lets see if we can agree on a few observations (I don’t know if they are correct):
1. The volume of FIRST is too low for healthy commercial interest.
2. The motor controller for FIRST has no other significant market.

If #1 & #2 are true then we are stuck and we have to beg a vendor for charity.

I am not sure (though this is not my field) that #2 needs to be true. Maybe it is true for the Jags but the Victors seems are used elsewhere too. So maybe what we need to do is to find something that is close (eg. Victor) and ask/beg that vendor to augment their controller for FIRST and hopefully encourage them to find other applications too. Who makes the Vics – maybe we can ask them – I read somewhere FIRST consumed 60K Vics so far. However, my team and many others it seems burn a few Vics every season so there is probably no incentive to change the design 

I think Techhelpbb said that in industry people don’t use generic speed controller like a Jaguar but custom design things for each application. I wonder why that is, and maybe a generic speed controller needs to hit a price point for that to change?

Dean
Let me be clear about what I'm really saying. If one wants to sell a lot of something you must be fast enough on your feet to realize just how to make it appealing enough to the situations where it might not be a perfect fit and how to make it fit well enough in the few tough situations where it must be a fit (unless you have a captive market or you don't mind lying possibly a lot).

Take the PC. Using a full blown PC for a FIRST robot is entirely possible. FIRST chooses to use a PLC because it's really more designed for industrial setting (so it's vocationally intelligent for future training) and because they don't have to narrow the hardware down so they get more predictable platforms. However quite obviously a massive number of PCs have been sold into lots of non-FIRST applications where maybe they aren't a perfect fit, but with a few alterations they'll work out. That's how you sell stuff by the truck and train load.

A FIRST specific speed control might be a perfect fit for FIRST (and in the case of the Jaguar it's not even really that because it's specifications limit it's usage to not every system generally) but a terrible fit for a linear positioning company like Intelligent Actuator.

You might be able to sell someone a Jaguar to build a CNC machine with CIMs. However, you'd need to make something to convert from G-code to the different instruction context of the Jaguar.

The Victor is basically a great big RC car speed control. That means it automatically taps the hobby market which is massively familiar with PWM and has an existing supply of PWM equipped control systems (some of which cost a sizable amount of money). The Victor works well for BattleBots where the idea is to scale up the basic RC car, while retaining similar designs. FIRST differs from BattleBots in the educational motivation (we don't just need quick and dirty robots to wreck, we need to be able to provide a positive educational experience).

The Victor isn't an ideal fit for FIRST either. It's advantage in FIRST starts with the fact that I suspect AndyMark tested all it's gear boxes with Victors driving the CIMs. It's really easy to build a drive train with AndyMark gear boxes that will hit the overloads on the Jaguar so the Victor often wins that contest of market by legacy placement and appeal (the 'older timers' saying: "We always did it with Victors and it worked so why do I need these Jaguars that seem to be a problem?"). Then there's the fact that the Victors are so simple and their reset cycle so graceful that most people didn't realize the Victors were reseting on them from overload for some time. Put a Jaguar in there where the monitoring of the system is much more evolved and suddenly you see the failure you never noticed before. Again lucky for FIRST our usage is infrequent or I suspect we'd destroy a lot more Victors with some of these robot designs. Then there's the lack of sensor inputs which is something the Victor design doesn't include because you'd have to decide what extra parts you want to stick users with that just want a big RC car speed control. The lack of sensors is a problem if you're trying to intimately control that motor through that Victor, obviously we work it out, but we pay for it with direct control and responsiveness.

The point I'm making? I am picking the one common demoninator that you've repeatedly noted in your comments to this topic. The FIRST speed control fits a specific power range of a specific style of electric motor. By putting the part of the electronic speed control that dictates the power it handles into a common module, mostly all by itself, we create a single part essentially common to almost all users in all fields. There is your 'big seller'. Everything beyond that? Everything beyond that in the interface modules and the 'custom circuit module' is up for grabs depending on what your priority is as the end user. If you're FIRST you want your limits imposed. If you're not FIRST you probably need almost the same circuit minus those FIRST limits. If you're building an RC car you probably don't need limit switches and encoders you just need PWM. If you're building a CNC servo controller you probably do need encoders and/or limit switches. If you're FIRST putting those sensors on that interface offloads your work load on the control system whether it's the cRIO, the IFI system or the original Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 system.

Heck you don't even need to limit yourself to just the power requirements of FIRST. You can make a high power 'front-end' module that acccepts an interface we made for one thing, but can drive a 48V 1HP or larger commutated induction motor with a few minor tweeks. Do you want to control the drive motor on a golf cart with the same interface module you used in FIRST...you certainly could! However, that size 'front-end' for this electronic motor control would be physically larger and need more cooling than a Victor that's for sure.

You are trying to find the business case for a FIRST product, but what I've actually described in this topic was a electronic motor controller with enough diversity in design to have multiple business cases in a variety of markets (I thought of more than 20 to date in other private conversations about this).

So if you're talking about tossing some funding and resources at something that in production might expand well beyond FIRST might I suggest that when the community project starts churning prototype hardware you consider helping us getting some donated funding? Consider that effectively you'd be getting in on the ground floor of a virtual startup that the community members basically boot strapped. Just keep in mind with that donation we would be churning community hardware that feeds diversity and creates expertise that other businesses could create commercial parts to. It's like donating money to MySQL, Linux or obviously FIRST. It's a donation that might pay back to a commercial enterpise it's weight in gold.

Last edited by techhelpbb : 22-04-2012 at 17:39.
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