Victors verses Jaguars?

[Greg Shaw]

I am a mentor for team 3601--a rookie team from Webberville Michigan. I was wondering if anyone can give me a pro/con list for Victors verses Jaguars. We chose jaguars for our drivetrain simply because the kit of parts came with more jaguars than victors. Specifically we had 4 jaguars and our drivetrain used 2 jaguars--this meant that we had 2 backup jaguars. For the chain tower that we built to hang tubes we used a victor.

Recently we had a 2 hour driving session with our robot--it had been a while since our last competition and our students wanted to use the robot. It turns out that 2 hours of continuos use puts alot of stress on CIM motors (lesson learned). We ended up burning out one of our CIM motors. When we fired the robot up the next day, I was surprised to dicover that it shut down the rest of the robot. I had expected the rest of the robot to work fine. I am wondering if this is a function of using a jaguar--it is my understanding that jaguars send info back to the lap top in a different way than victors. Would things had gone differently if we had used a victor? I understand that the simple fix is to replace the broken CIM motor--I am just trying to figure out how the system works so I can make educated decisions about speed controllers on future robots.