Building a second robot - electronics?

[GreyingJay]

For the purposes of driving a second robot in your home lab, it does not have to be any particular D-Link or OpenMesh router - any WiFi router that you can power from on-board the robot and that can provide IP addresses for your RoboRio and your driver station laptop will work.

Keeping with the thread topic, 2706 made it a priority early on that we were going to build two copies of our robot for drive practice (and also wiring practice, fab practice, etc.). We received one complete RoboRio control set in the rookie kit last year and one of our mentors was generous enough to buy a second whole control system to donate to the team.

Our two robots were virtually identical except one used Victor SP's and the other used Victor 888's - most sourced from vouchers and/or FIRST Choice.

Edit: here's a better photo of the twins

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

Our two robots were virtually identical except one used Victor SP's and the other used Victor 888's - most sourced from vouchers and/or FIRST Choice.

Certainly infinitely better than not having two fully-functioning independent robots, but I have it on good faith that there is a noticeable difference in the response curves of the Victor 888 and Victor SP. Looking at data helpfully provided by 1718 here, the 888 does not have a linear response curve (look at Victor 888 cool, not Victor 888). I don't have good data for the Victor SP, but I would assume it has a linear response curve like the rest of the more recent motor controllers. This could likely make a difference in driver practice and autonomous programming for small movements at low voltages.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Ari423

Certainly infinitely better than not having two fully-functioning independent robots, but I have it on good faith that there is a noticeable difference in the response curves of the Victor 888 and Victor SP. Looking at data helpfully provided by 1718 here, the 888 does not have a linear response curve (look at Victor 888 cool, not Victor 888). I don't have good data for the Victor SP, but I would assume it has a linear response curve like the rest of the more recent motor controllers. This could likely make a difference in driver practice and autonomous programming for small movements at low voltages.

Yup - we noticed

In the grand scheme of things it didn't make a big difference but yes, the two robots behaved slightly differently. In this game it was largely about pedal-to-the-metal driving whether it was to fly over a defense or get to a boulder, so it didn't have a big impact on our driver training. We thought about making adjustments (squaring the inputs, etc.) but decided it didn't really matter.