Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Copioli
This is an example of what we had envisioned when designing the SRX encoder breakout.
We found that mounting a PCB directly to the Talon's housing is not without risk. Foreign objects such as wrenches, misplaced hands... would damage the PCB and sometimes the Talons data connector.
The other concern, there is no female counter part to the Data connector, at least not one that is keyed. This would make it possible to insert the breakout backwards, which could damage both the Talon and the down-stream device.
Since there is no easy way to enforce polarity we felt it would cause less stress for teams to have a breakout that was inline with the Talons wiring.
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Definitely valid concerns. I imagined it would be easier for teams to damage the ribbon cable though. With the solder pads, if anything between the Talon and encoder fails, there's a good deal of work needed to make a repair (assuming you don't have a spare cable for each of your different encoder setups prepared).
Is there a small piece of plastic you can attach that fits the slot? Or perhaps just an incredibly obvious silkscreen marking? Or some kind of molding around the board? The inline method seems a bit hokey to me
Maybe I just need to play with brushless motor drivers more..
I have some gripes with the boards other than mounting (why not integrate analog + encoder and just sell 1 board? spots for pull-up resistors? etc), but I also imagine a better version will present itself in the future. Until then, ours will suffice.