Hi everyone,
Our team, which is in it's 6th year, has used only Jag's for all of our history. We started with them because they were more interesting, and sophisticated. I think the the first year was PWM just because the old tan Jag's didn't have the 232-CAN converter capability that the black ones that came out the next year did.
We have fried I think 5 in the last 5 years, and I only know of one that wasn't our fault, it was the driver chip in that version of Jag's.
I encourage the team to NEVER do metal work with the electronics mounted, and I think that's good practice no matter what you are using.
Of course sometimes it's unavoidable, and then we cover things up, and use a shop vac to suck things up as we are drilling, etc.
We like the CAN, although I will say it can (no pun intended
) be trying once and a while.
The feedback, and control it offers is great to work with though.
We did learn one lesson last year and that was not to use 10 or more Jag's on the CAN bus at a time when using the first black Jag as a serial-CAN converter. There were timeout issues and the robot wouldn't work properly half the time with 11 Jags.
We backed it off to 8 Jag's and everything suddenly worked great!
Anyways, we've already bought some more anticipating this years season.
A poll, or survey would be a great idea, how many use the 3 different brands of controllers, and how many use CAN?
Next year will the Talons have CAN? That'd be cool.
I was thinking about one of the posts about max current output. If one liked Talons for instance because they could put out 100 A continously, and one had 4 CIMs on the drive train, that'd be 400 A draw. I'm thinking your wiring and so forth wouldn't last long if you did that all the time.....
Maybe you don't want that capability?
Maybe you'd use the sensor in the Jag for current feedback to the software in the cRio, and when it approched say, 50A, a warning would come on and a routine might back off the current so as to not burn things up.
Sometimes drivers need to know when to stop pushing the joystick forward if the bot isn't moving....... lol I'm just saying
Whatever you use, have fun and be safe,
Mike