Talons, Jaguars and Victors - where do you stand?

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by MikeE

The DSC is also a single point of failure and disables all PWM controlled motors,

Not the way we've managed to break them. The just lose a channel or two.

[Michael DiRamio]

Originally Posted by mman1506

The only big team not using talons that I saw was 1114 who only used victors as they are sponsored by IFI

I would just like to make it clear that, while we are extremely thankful for the support of IFI, we would use Victors either way.

Year after year they have proven to be a reliable and robust component of our robots.

[jblay]

I would do to our remaining jags what they will eventually do to themselves and burn them, if the students would let me...

[theawesome1730]

We used only Victor 888s and we were very pleased. Other than some slight issues when using "y" PWMs on drivetrain Victors, everything went very well. They are very robust and we haven't had to replace a single one yet (through 2 regionals and lots of practice). I would like to run talons for next year, game permitting (need of PID loops for shooter wheels or whatnot in an instance where very linear response is necessary).

[dudefise]

We used a combination of Talons and Jaguars this year. I was very impressed with the Talons' resilience; we lost connection one match and ran into a wall, stall all 4 CIMs for the remainder of the match. One talon burned, but the rest were undamaged.It was later determined that the burned talon was due to a wiring fault.
We will probably use Talons for all drive motors in the future, and Jaguars for sensor-based or precision applications.

[Gregor]

Originally Posted by dudefise

We used a combination of Talons and Jaguars this year. I was very impressed with the Talons' resilience; we lost connection one match and ran into a wall, stall all 4 CIMs for the remainder of the match. One talon burned, but the rest were undamaged.It was later determined that the burned talon was due to a wiring fault.
We will probably use Talons for all drive motors in the future, and Jaguars for sensor-based or precision applications.

Did you press the E-Stop? That's pretty much the reason it exists.

[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.

[mman1506]

Originally Posted by Michael DiRamio

I would just like to make it clear that, while we are extremely thankful for the support of IFI, we would use Victors either way.

Year after year they have proven to be a reliable and robust component of our robots.

Sorry about misquoting you guys. I should have worded that better.

[dellagd]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

Not the way we've managed to break them. The just lose a channel or two.

Has happened to us too. Now thats a problem we didnt expect.

[ehochstein]

2470 used a combination of victors and jags this year. Needless to say we will never be using Jaguars again, at the competition we ended up replacing all of our jags with victors as the jags kept failing. I told the kids we were going to try out Talons next year.

Now that it is the off-season for us I've started to do some testing as to why our jags failed. So far I've found that anytime the robot is enabled and one of our problem jaguars has an active PWM connection the LED indicator light will blink red as if it was getting a reverse signal. I've tried just about everything to stop this from happening - replacing the limit switch jumpers, reseting the jag etc. but it continues to not work. My diagnosis at the moment is a failed thermistor.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Iaquinto.Joe

Our load was a motor that we had lying around.

Was the motor loaded, or free-spinning?

I believe we had a mix of 888s and 884s

That might explain your differing results. They have dissimilar output characteristics.

We couldn't get our hands on talons unfortunately.

The link I provided has test results for Jag, Vic884, Vic888, and Talon.

[xraymypanda]

We used a combination of talons and victor 888s this year and are extremely satisfied. We used the talons on our drive and found that it feels smoother than the jags we have on last year's bot of similar size, weight, and drive train. We used victors for our shooter and out elevation adjustment and saw no flaws in operation that weren't our own fault.
However, we found out very late that the victors do not have the same size pwm port as the talons and our pwms didn't quite fit until we shaved them down.
Overall we are very pleased and will continue to use both in the future.