blog; Motor Controller Options for 2015

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Seriously though, these things are even smaller than Spikes. I can see why you would only bother with 4 relay ports on the roboRIO if you knew these were in the pipeline. Why bother with a 20A max relay with a fuse you have to replace when you can have a 40A speed controller in the same footprint?

Driving solenoid valves, driving solenoid actuators, powering lights, saving money, and using parts you already have.

I still don't like the 4 relay ports on the roboRIO because we've used more than four relays multiple times. It seems kind of silly to me that we downgraded from a maximum of 16 relays to 4 on the new controller, considering the driving circuitry for the relays is probably not too complicated.