Standard Motor Driver Schematic for FRC

[Jared]

I don't think too many teams have the resources/skills to make motor drivers for less than the cost of something like the Spark given only schematics.

Even though you might be able to buy all the components for real cheap on Digikey, you don't have a circuit board. Some weird parts like gate drivers might only come in surface mount packages sometimes. Even if you did find all the parts in through hole packages, you need to worry about all sorts of electrical interference issues - the FRC controllers don't have isolated logic and power, so you'd need to be clever with how you laid out your board to prevent transients from messing with the microcontroller.

Then, you'd have to figure out how to program the microcontroller. I have yet to find a through hole microcontroller that supports a direct USB connection, so you'd need to buy some sort of programming board or get really good a surface mount soldering.