Demonstration Robot Alternative to Spike Relay

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Qbot2640

We use a fair amount of Spikes in our builds, and we robbed our '13 and '14 robots for this year's build. We want to keep both of those bots for demonstrations, and they both have 4-slot CRios (so they make nice programming development platforms) but I'm having trouble justifying buying new spikes when I imagine there is another relay available that is much cheaper and would work just as well. 2013, for example, has three motors in the shooter that all have individual Spikes...for a bot that never has to pass another FRC inspection, is there a cheaper option?

Define "work just as well". If you're looking for something with the same current rating, 5V inputs, and you don't want to bodge 3-4 individual SPDT relays into something like an H-bridge, then I don't think there's actually anything available that's cheaper than the Spike. There's some multi-channel relay boards, but you'd have to rig up 4 of the channels on there to turn it into a Spike equivalent.