pic: Team 1382 Eletronics Board

[JamesByrne]

A little off the subject, but how do teams like the jaguars so far.

I saw you have the four mounted on the board, sorry for my not knowing in the matter but what is the advantages of those compared to the victors.

I appreciate someone responding and explaining this to me. Thanks in advance.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by JamesByrne

A little off the subject, but how do teams like the jaguars so far.

I saw you have the four mounted on the board, sorry for my not knowing in the matter but what is the advantages of those compared to the victors.

I appreciate someone responding and explaining this to me. Thanks in advance.

The Jaguars provide several advantages over the old Victors.

First, their response is much, much more linear - this means you can have much better fine motor control at slow speeds. The Victors had a larger deadband (area in the middle where nothing happened), and after that an oddly shaped curve that could make programming and controlling a nightmare.

Second, the Jaguars have built in headers for limit switches. If you're controlling an arm of some sorts, and there's a point you don't want the arm to move past, you can hook up a simple limit switch to the Jaguar and the Jaguar will stop the motor from moving past that, regardless of what the code is telling it to do. With the old Victors, you would have to make that type of stop an integral part of your code, which leads to the potential for problems.

Finally, the Jaguars have the ability to operate on a CAN bus (even though we can't use it this year), which has a lot of potential for being really nice in future years.

So those are a lot of pro's for the Jaguars over the Victors. And the only con (that we've found, at least) is that the Jaguars are about 3 times bigger than the Victors. They're absolutely massive, but if you can find the space in your robot, they work really well.