Night & Day

[Cory]

Originally Posted by robostangs548

When I saw pictures like this on CD I thought that they were going to be like GINOURMOUS, but they really are not that big, and they feel like there construction is of much better quality, like it is a "top of the line" type product. I actually like them, and don't really mind the size, because they pretty much are equal in weight.

I hardly think putting a pretty plastic casing around them makes them more "quality" than the victors.

[Jonathan Norris]

I'm not too excited for these until we can use the CAN features, and see how the nifty built features actually work.

[daltore]

Originally Posted by Cory

I hardly think putting a pretty plastic casing around them makes them more "quality" than the victors.

The case isn't just there for looks, it's a shroud to protect the H-bridge, and from what I've heard, it works pretty well, it keeps aluminum shavings and dust out. I have a dead Victor next to my computer right now, and it's really easy to see what a big deal that tiny consideration can be, HALF of the MOSFETs are charred white and actually blown out, just from a short caused by an aluminum shaving that got away from our protective towel. I'd say the case is worth it, and especially when we get the CAN interface green light, these Jaguars are going to be SO nice. Bottom line, if they're too big for you, and you've got enough money to buy a bunch of Victors, you don't have to use the Jaguar.

[synth3tk]

And, as stated somewhere in one of these threads, it's an awesome engineering challenge. Where's the fun if it were just a puzzle?

[mcf747]

Im going to touch on a few points here.....

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

With any luck it will FORCE teams to clean up their wiring and electrical boards.

I do all the electrical for my team and I must say I had the cleanest electrical board and wire harness that I saw at both of the regionals we went too and of any photos I saw. (Not to brag) But I think this is a good thing having a clean rig made it take up much less space and because everything was so clean we had no electrical problems all year.

Originally Posted by Deep Dark

guess we'll just need to not put as much mechanical stuff on inorder to make weight and size.

This has been my though exactly! I have a feeling the game this year is going to be less focused on mechanical abilities and more "smart programming" and "intelligent robots". Some of my team mates have said just the opposite, thinking the game is going to be more mechanical based and less "intelligence" based because of patters they think they have found (we never know with FIRST) which also makes sense because that would allow us to get aquainted with all of this new stuff before we "really" had to use it to its full potential.

Originally Posted by JesseK

Yesterday we figured out a nifty space-saving way to mount these, and I'll post a pic tomorrow night once I put the memory card back into my camera so it will save the picture

Take a 1/16" wall angle aluminum piece that has 2.5" legs (hard to find I know, we had to cut metal meant for another purpose to get it), drill holes that are far enough up and apart so that a Jaguar can be vertically mounted to it. Then, mount the Jaguars back-to-back on the mount -- but -- rotate one of the Jaguars 180 degrees on the axis that's normal to the mount plate. This will put all of the motor outputs on one side and all of the power inputs on the other. Then, using either a 3" #8 bolt & nut, OR a #10 2" machine screw, you can screw the Jaguars to each other. For a production mount piece, you can mill out unnecessary metal from the middle and still maintain the rigidity.

I think this is really clever I have not had much time with the new parts to play with them to much but I think this may become an necesity. Last year I have very little space given to me to do all the electronics to I came up with a "double decker" design but only used the top of each deck. I am thinking about going with a similar design but mounting stuff inverted, to the bottom of each deck and maybe on the side between the decks but I need to get ventilation in there some how.