[FRC Blog] 2017 Motor (and Servo?) Controllers and MXP

[Rich Anderson]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

Sorry we were late making our product page public. You can learn more about it here http://www.revrobotics.com/rev-11-1144/



We don't know what the rules will end up being but this is designed to allow much larger servos on robots, so I would hope the rules are open enough to allow them. In addition to our Smart robot servo, there are plenty of large scale servos available in the open market.

The real added benefits of this come from cost per degree of freedom, since you don't need a separate motor controller for your servos you can save at-least $45 per actuation over a motor by just removing that requirement. We will all learn in January what FIRST will allow this year.

I am working on a prototype turret driven by a pixy cam, and am worried about the servo load on the pixy. Would the motor controller be the answer for an arduino server output too? I am thinking of using a parallel 12v to 5v power supply similar to the LED light hookup on the RioDuino. The servo power supply sounds neat if the game calls for servos this year (I would like to use the Smart servos, which we already have in our inventory).