[dtengineering]

I've been using Victors for years, and love them. Over seven years we've blown precisely one of them... in our first year... when late at night we hooked three of them up BACKWARDS and ran the robot for many seconds. And we only blew one of the three. Those things are TOUGH.

But the new Jags are worth taking a look at. Our programmer and drivers find they have better low-end response than the Victors, and while we haven't quantified it, I feel it, too, when I try my hand at driving the robot.

Even better, though, is that the new "Black" Jags don't require PWM at all... you can communicate over serial and ... using the built-in encoders and limit switches on the speed controllers off-load a lot of your processing to the controller.

From what I understand, if you've got one "Black" Jag and some of the "Beige" jags, you can use the Black one to do the RS232 communications and then communicate with the other Jags over the CAN network.

The possibility of off-loading PID, limit switch handling and all that to the speed controller is a real paradigm shift for me... it means that anything that can send a serial signal is suddenly a pretty powerful robot controller! Got an old laptop kicking around?

Jason