blog; Motor Controller Options for 2015

[AK Koaster]

The only thing I'm slightly worried about on these is the heat dissipation: I'm not exactly the most knowledgeable on the subject, but looking at the size, I'm a bit worried whether or not there will be enough surface area on the controllers to adequately cool them down. In the documentation, it states that the fins will take care of passive cooling, but we've traditionally put fans on our speed controllers, even the Talons (we had a bunch of extra fans of that size, so we figured why not). Would like to talk to some teams early in the season after they've started working with them, see what their findings are. Active cooling for these might be a challenge, aside from putting a big computer fan over a network just for a little cooling, I don't see an extremely efficient way of doing it.

However, I'm still really excited, as these seem to be pretty well suited for FIRST in terms of price point, size (haven't used Jaguars in years specifically for that reason) and reliability during competition. Not working with screw terminals will be great as well, I always seem to lose those screws, and they're really hard to find once they roll away on the shop floor.