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Originally Posted by Mike Copioli
The situation with CAN is a bit paradoxical, we would like to release a CAN enabled version of the TALON, we feel that if we were to correct some of the issues with CAN in FIRST teams would see the benefit and slowly migrate away from PWM and into CAN thus increasing the demand.
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I've been slowly trying to do that over the last few seasons. However, with some of the issues with CAN for FRC as well as the Jaguars(ie.. brownout & forget closed loop configuration) I haven't been able to do that. If those issues could be corrected, I'm in 100%. As I understood it, not many if any teams do BETA testing with CAN, so that alone would help.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Copioli
This becomes even more challenging with the new reduced pricing. I truly believe that a properly implemented CAN interface is a better solution for FIRST than PWM.
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Agreed, CAN is a much more elegant and neater(no more rats nest of pwm wires) solution than PWM. The ability to do asynchronous co-operative processing with controllers over the CAN bus is really awesome. We did some of that this season.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Copioli
The questions I have for the FIRST community are: What would you be willing to pay for a CAN enabled motor controller that had a footprint slightly larger than the Talon?
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I would be willing to pay more for a CAN enabled Talon with a slightly larger footprint. Of course, how big a price difference matters, as well as how much bigger it is. For example, 1.25 - 1.50 times as much, and smaller than a Jaguar I'd be sold on. Again it's something that needs to be thought about as it's a Price/Performance/Value question which is hard to answer right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Copioli
Second would the increase in footprint make the Talon less desirable for PWM users?
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We've used the larger Jaguars on our drive system with PWM because we wanted the better linearity of the Jaguar. So for some teams perhaps size matters, it all depends on what their objectives are. Of course now that the Talons have that great linearity too, we'll most likely switch to Talons.
I don't know if this would be viable, but what about 2 different Talon models? A PWM only as is today that has the small footprint and low price point, and a CAN only as an optional model? I don't know if there's enough market for the CAN only model, but it's a thought.