Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
60 watts for the largest size is a tough specification. Hard to get rid of the heat or supply the current but I am sure there are some interesting uses.
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The specification is 60W/m, so you're only dumping that much power if you're using a meter of the wire. The specs actually recommend a supply current of 2.75A for the largest wire, and 8Ω/m resistance. So on an FRC robot, you'd actually be limited to about .5m at most between terminals unless you were getting fancy with multiple sources or grounds on the wire. Which means you'd be looking at 30W dissipation, which is paltry compared to most of our motors. All the other flavors have other length limits, but they all work out to around .5m with a 12V supply.
I think the real trick to using this stuff would be properly controlling the current in the short segments you'd be likely to use on a robot. For a 10cm segment of the thick stuff, you'd want to hold 2.2V RMS to heat it properly. That works out to a 3.3% duty cycle, which is the minimum duty cycle on a Victor, and pretty darned small on a jaguar.