Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?

[Leav]

Even though the Talons sounded very tempting with their sealed form factor and mostly passive cooling, I was adamant about not using them in 2013 since they were new, and I had no idea how well they'd hold up.

Early adopters of the talons, hold-outs, opponents and proponents: as the season nears it's climax, where do you stand on the talons now?

Have they proven their mettle? have they earned you respect? and the ultimate test: will you use them in 2014?

[mman1506]

At GTRE very few teams were using anything but talons. The only big team not using talons that I saw was 1114 who only used victors as they are sponsored by IFI (I was told this by a team member).

While not applicable to FIRST I love that talons can take up to 28 volts and have a higher update rate than victors. We will continue to use them for the foreseeable future.

[Michael Blake]

We used the new Victor 888's _exclusively_ and are _very_ pleased with their performance.

Not so pleased with _our_ performance this season, but the Victors played no role in that.

We'll continue using Victor 888's in future seasons.

--Michael Blake

[Gregor]

Talons 100%. No issue at all with them, and the space saving was huge compared to Victors and (moreso) Jags. Unless you are sponsored by IFI, have a very large stockpile of Victors/Jags, or if you are using CAN, I don't see why anyone would use anything but Talons in the future.

[Luigi]

We (Team 1540) used Talons this year and were extremely happy with their performance. Because of the new size restrictions (54" cylinder) we had to minimize the space used for control systems (electrical). In previous years, we had used Jaguars over Victors due to reliability, but this year we found the Talons were as reliable as Jaguars but with the surface area (about) of a Victor. This helped so much to cut down the size of the control board, which was extremely beneficial this year.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by Luigi

We (Team 1540) used Talons this year and were extremely happy with their performance. Because of the new size restrictions (54" cylinder) we had to minimize the space used for control systems (electrical). In previous years, we had used Jaguars over Victors due to reliability, but this year we found the Talons were as reliable as Jaguars but with the surface area (about) of a Victor. This helped so much to cut down the size of the control board, which was extremely beneficial this year.

Not sure what your experiences have been with victors. I have used jaguars from 2010-2012, and victors from 2002 to about 2009. i am pretty sure I had more broken jaguars in 3 years then all my years of using victors.

I finally went back to victor this year and I really like the 888s this year. I will have to try the talons this summer.

[Iaquinto.Joe]

Testing of the controllers showed that Jaguars have a better curve on output, which convinced us to use jaguars for our drive motors, but we will continue to use victors for all other control.

[Chris is me]

Does anyone have any experience with directly comparing the Talon and the Victor 888? I know a lot of teams went from 884s to Talons, but I am interested to hear if people have tried both new speed controllers and found major advantages or disadvantages in one type.

We used 888s on our drive and 884s elsewhere, extremely satisfied with the performance of the 888s.

[dellagd]

As of now, only the Jags have CAN capability, which we utilize for more than just setting he output voltage.

Therefore, Jags

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Iaquinto.Joe

Testing of the controllers showed that Jaguars have a better curve on output...

Better than what? What kind of testing?

[Iaquinto.Joe]

Originally Posted by Ether

Better than what? What kind of testing?

I believe we graphed output in volts over input in percentage (-1.0 - 1.0). The result showed remarkable consistency between jaguars while victors varied wildly and no two victors were alike. Also, jaguar graphs showed a smother curve of input to output than victor graphs. I don't have the chart on hand right now.

[Grim Tuesday]

We moved from exclusively Jaguars last year to a mix of Jags and Victor 888's.

We would have replaced the Victors with Talons except we were late to the party and couldn't get any Talons when we needed them. We were also worried that if the stock was so limited and we had a failure, we would be unable to replace them.

Next year I expect we will continue to use the combo of jags and victors. Victors for things that don't require advanced control like the drive mtoors and Jaguars for things like shooters, arms, etc...

Jaguars, we do use CAN and the advanced features like PID internal to the Jag and wiring limit switches directly to them to reduce response time. Another great feature of the Jaguar that we used this year is the ability to run them independent of the general control system.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Iaquinto.Joe

I believe we graphed output in volts over input in percentage (-1.0 - 1.0).

Was this open-circuit voltage, or did you have a load applied? If no load, the results are not too meaningful for FRC purposes.

If you did have a load, what were you using for a load?

The result showed remarkable consistency between jaguars while victors varied wildly and no two victors were alike. Also, jaguar graphs showed a smother curve of input to output than victor graphs.

What kind of Victors? 884 or 888? They have substantially different output curves. The 888s are considerably more linear than the 884s.

This thread is about Talons too. Did your testing include looking at the Talon output?

If not, you might be interested in these test results.

[Iaquinto.Joe]

Originally Posted by Ether

Was this open-circuit voltage, or did you have a load applied? If no load, the results are not too meaningful for FRC purposes.

If you did have a load, what were you using for a load?



What kind of Victors? 884 or 888? They have substantially different output curves. The 888s are considerably more linear than the 884s.

This thread is about Talons too. Did your testing include looking at the Talon output?

If not, you might be interested in these test results.

Our load was a motor that we had lying around. I'm not sure which kind. I believe we had a mix of 888s and 884s, but mostly 884s. We didn't have more than four 888s, the amount we needed.
We couldn't get our hands on talons unfortunately.

[Jon Stratis]

We used 10 talons on our robot, and they worked beautifully. One did stop working halfway through a regional... We didn't have time to troubleshoot so we swapped it quickly. I think it might have just been a loose connection, but we won't know until we get the robot out of the bag (MN State competition May 18) and have some time to hook it up and test.

Overall, I think they performed great!