Standard Motor Driver Schematic for FRC

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

I think that most people in this thread have summarized the reasons why letting teams make their own motor controllers is not a practical idea, as there are so many things that can happen when hand assembling something to handle this amount of power. Even if 99% of the motor controllers were done properly the 1% of them that fail can cause fire, robots not responding in a controlled fashion, and a bunch of other issues.


Some people might not have realized this, but we have published the schematic for the SPARK at the back of our user guide. We believe that people should be able to learn from the product itself and not just the use of the product. Here is the direct link (PDF) http://www.revrobotics.com/wp-conten...1200-UM-00.pdf

If any student wants to create their own "homebrew" version of the SPARK we encourage you to try, because reproducing is a great way of learning. For a low cost way to make your own PCB's, my friends own Dirtypcbs.com (and regardless of their name make good quality cheap boards)

Greg, I didn't know this and I'm actually really happy. It'll at least help me figure out whether it's worth the effort to put together a custom ESC for a project that falls nicely in that gap between what a VexController 29 can drive (which is actually quite a bit more than you'd think) and where I'd use a Spark (I'm cheap, like REALLY cheap) There exist a handful of brushed ESCs from China in that range but, frankly, their english documentation and my knowledge of the Chinese language seem to share the property of being bad/nonexistent.