FRC Blog - 2016 Motor Controllers

[sastoller]

Great paper! I found the read very interesting, with very informative, useful results to help teams pick the right motor controller.

A great addition to this experiment would also have been to include temperature measurements on the motor controllers after 30 seconds, 1 minute etc. I would also love to see results for the older Talon SR and JAG motor controllers since many teams still use these. One final addition would be to test several motor controllers of the same type to get an idea of the variation between controllers (is it 1% or 10% variation between controllers of the same type?).

My big takeaway from all this is that the SD540 is unnacceptable for use in FRC robots due to the brown-out issue. In addition, with it's high output resistance, it would no doubt, would get very, very warm in a stall condition. You can estimate the power that is turned into heat in the output devices of the SD540 to be nearly 50 Watts in the resistive load test 3, at 11.20 volts. With a CIM motor, the SD540 would be dissipating ~100 watts of energy as heat. I wonder how long it takes to melt (can someone test and post pictures please)?

It looks like the SPARK is a very good controller, for the price. It performs nearly as well as the two pricier alternatives. The downside for the SPARK is the form-factor.