Quote:
Originally Posted by ozrien
Yeah I'm not sure that's fair Scott, that's a bit harsh...
"The first one through the wall always gets bloody." - Moneyball (film)
Before the Jag, CANbus was totally unheard of. And because of the Jag, teams got their first glimpse at what smart motor controllers could do in FRC.
Teams also got exposed to web-based diagnostics through CTRE's 2CAN and Jags. And now the RIO has both web-based diagnostics and CANbus integrated. So I'd say it was a learning curve that benefited several aspects of the control system.
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As far as I am concerned - the problem with the Jaguars was not the concept or even the initial delivery.
The problem with the Jaguars was that once issues started to pop up it was difficult to get either clear support from the community or any one else. Often the list of potential issues that could cause complications was also so large such that the Jaguars never stood a chance.
Take CAN as a fine example. Yes there was CAN support from both the cRIO control system and the Jaguar but there were all sorts of issues lurking around in there. CAN itself is extremely robust and easily safe to use in vehicle applications.
I still have all the FRC11 Jaguars in my storage and frankly I still consider them usable as long as one is prepared to explore the intricacy. That's the killer right there - planning on the intricacy.
Even if my idea of building a Makerspace with FRC gear doesn't play out - at least now I have both an AndyMark drivetrain and a custom drivetrain to run tests with uncommited to the FRC competition itself. Once the Jaguars started giving FRC11 trouble it was a mess for us. There was not enough uncommitted hardware to do any testing either just for FRC11 or just for the sake of feeding results to the community. So that intricacy was bad news for the Jaguars because we could toss Victors onto what we had those years and it ran. At some point we just had to toss the Jaguars aside to keep moving forward.