Jaguar VS Victor

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by mikets

From the discussion in this and other threads, it seems the consenses is that the Jags are beneficial only because of the CAN bus functionality and the more linear power curve. What I am interested in knowing is how many teams actually found these benefits indispensable and under what circumstances? We have been using Victors all these years and don't see the need to go with the Jags. I know CAN bus offers a lot of new nice functionalities but how many teams are actually using them in software and if they absolutely cannot do without these functionalities? Every year we had a discussion on switching to Jags but when doing cost and benefit analysis, Jags always lose out for us.

We used CAN for Breakaway to control a kicker. To get it in position, we used current mode control to move backwards until it felt a force from a hardstop. To fire, we used an intentionally under-damped PID looped around position on an encoder. This made it easy to reliably control the rest positions and contact speed.

I do have to admit that we had a slight advantage - 3 of the mentors were involved in the design of some aspect of the CAN system.